


The Divided City

by sweettears90



Series: Divided Series [1]
Category: Divergent (Movies), Divergent Series - Veronica Roth
Genre: F/M, Science Experiment, dark au, divergent war, future reality show
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-23
Updated: 2015-09-10
Packaged: 2018-03-31 22:12:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 19
Words: 95,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3994816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweettears90/pseuds/sweettears90
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. All Tris wanted was to have a normal life. So what if her definition of normal meant abandoning her family in order to join Dauntless? She was not a monster, and she did not sign up to be in the middle of a war run by her mother. </p>
<p>Human beings are exceptionally very fragile creatures. You put a bullet into their brain, their heart, their lung, they’ll die. You take out their internal organs, they’ll die. They lose two-thirds of the blood in their body, they will die.<br/>However, there is much to be said about the emotional and psychological resilience of humans. Humans can go through all sorts of emotional trauma and somehow come out even stronger than before they went in.<br/>In the year 2073, a group of scientists in the United States was tasked to find out exactly how far that humans could be stretched.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so here's the thing: I was always very bothered by Divergent. I think that there was a lot of potential within the series, but for two things: A basic lack of knowing how people function and a lack of logic.
> 
> The idea for this wouldn't leave me alone, and now, I am rewriting the series while I add in both of those missing elements.
> 
> Some part of this are basically the same, and things only really start to branch off and get into the other elements until most of the way through the fourth chapter. The stuff before that is a lot of rehashing what everybody already knows from the first book, as well as working hard to establish the world that they live in. It's not quite the same as in the books, so don't be so quick to brush it off.
> 
> Also, because I know that a lot of people are going to ask this: Amity doesn't exist in this because their function was almost identical to Abnegation. There are plenty of people who are in the Abnegation faction (and you will soon find out why), so there would be more than enough people to help with the homeless as well as to grow food for all four factions.
> 
> And one more thing: Homeless does not equal factionless. The factionless still exist, just not in the exact same concept as in the original book. I haven't quite started to write with the factionless plot just yet, but trust me when I say that you'll know when it's introduced.
> 
> Homeless people within the context of this story are simply just that: people who are homeless.

Human beings are exceptionally very fragile creatures. You put a bullet into their brain, their heart, their lung, they’ll die. You take out their internal organs, they’ll die. They lose two-thirds of the blood in their body, they will die. 

However, there is much to be said about the emotional and psychological resilience of humans. Humans can go through all sorts of emotional trauma and somehow come out even stronger than before they went in. 

In the year 2073, a group of scientists in the United States was tasked to find out exactly how far that humans could be stretched. The first project, codenamed First City, gathered a bunch of test subjects into a simulated city for an indeterminate amount of time. The project was deemed a failure after every single scientist working on the project was found dead about eight months into the project— every single death had been ruled a suicide. It is still unclear to this day what had gone on inside of First City, but, judging by the notes that lead up to the tragedy, just witnessing the extreme amounts of psychological torture that the scientists were inflicting upon their subjects had driven them all to suicide. 

After a new group of scientists analyzed the notes and dismantled First City, a new test began, codenamed New City. Once again, the goal was to test to see how far humans could be stretched before they broke. 

It wasn’t until Dawn City, nearly fifty years later, that the American Public caught wind of the disturbing science experiments. And, what made the situation even worse, was that, after much mud-slinging, nearly half of the government admitted to, not only having prior knowledge about the experiments, but also voted in favor of giving more money to the projects to keep them running. 

However, once the initial shock that the government was, not only condoning such experiments, but was also backing them, had worn off, the public did something that was one part shocking, but mostly completely expected: They wanted to watch the experiments themselves. They were annoyed at what humanity had first dubbed “reality television”, since it had started to become more and more obviously scripted. To watch the experiments, they explained, was pure and raw, and therefore, held the most entertainment value. 

The year is now 2203. The experiment of Divided City had been running for the past 70 years, and is currently in its third generation. None of the citizens of Divided know that they are in a massive science experiment, nor are they aware that every single movement that they make is filmed 24/7. 

 

* * *

 

As Beatrice Prior watched her nimble fingers twisting her long, sandy blonde hair into a braid, she thought that she saw a faint, red, blinking light in the upper right-hand corner of the mirror. But as she stood up onto her tip-toes to get a better look, the only thing that she saw was her own reflection. 

She brushed it off as a floater in her eye. After all, it didn’t make sense for there to be a red, blinking light in her bathroom mirror. How… She struggled to think of a word to describe somebody spying on her in the bathroom. It was creepy yes, but also seemed rather boring. The Prior family was a very boring family. Or at least, Beatrice thought so. 

 

But, maybe she wasn’t one to ask about the subject. She thought that everybody who lived in Abnegation all lead very boring lives. The credence of the faction revolved around being as selfless as they possibly could. The adults spent most of the day working with the homeless to help get them off the streets, which was a seemingly endless job. If they weren’t doing that, then they would help out members of the other factions with other jobs: painting houses, fixing cars, running basic errands. 

 

The children in Abnegation were expected to help their parents as much as they could, but they also had an obligation to attend school. The school was run by Erudite, and only lasted until the students were sixteen. Once a year, all of the children who had turned 16 in the past year were rounded up. First, they were given a test to see which of the four factions that they should go into. Abnegation for the selfless, Candor for the honest, Dauntless for the brave, or Erudite for the smart.

 

The children were encouraged to listen to their heart and to pick a faction that they felt as though they would be best in. Sound advice, for certain, but it also came with a horrible double standard: Pick the faction that you were born into or else face social shaming and ostracization. 

 

There was an uneasy feeling in Beatrice’s stomach at the thought of the upcoming test. It was completely forbidden to speak about it, but there were rumors that the others in Beatrice’s year were talking about. Everything from trial by combat to picking a slip of paper with the faction written on it out from a hat (the old, “it’s fate if you pick the faction that you feel you belong with method”, they say. If you pick something else, then obviously, your feelings on the subject are wrong). Each one sounded stupider and more outrageous than the last.

 

Beatrice wished that she could speak to her older brother, Caleb about it. But he’d done his selection exactly one year ago today, and he’d selected Erudite. She had seen him exactly once since then, and it was only at the quarterly meeting of the four factions, and only from a distance. Caleb had never looked over towards where Abnegation faction sat, and their parents had never looked over towards where the Erudite faction sat. It had made Beatrice’s heart ache. 

 

The train car for the Abnegation was quiet, but that wasn’t anything new at all. As part of the faction’s ideology towards selflessness, they tried to talk as little as possible, so as to not offend somebody with too much noise. As the train rounded a bend and headed towards the Dauntless faction, the air was filled with the war-like cries of the Dauntless students as they jumped onto the train. On the seat besides Beatrice, Susan Black pressed her lips together. 

 

It wasn’t exactly a secret within the Abnegation faction that they thought that the Dauntless were reckless morons who would only get themselves killed. But the members of the faction only said this to their own families, behind closed doors. Never in public; it might offend somebody. 

 

Beatrice had known Susan her entire life; they lived across the street from one another, and had played together when they were younger. Susan was the only friend that Beatrice had, as sad as that might seem. Beatrice wanted to ask Susan about what faction that she might join, but hadn’t been able to find a good opportunity to bring it up. She knocked her knee gently into Susan’s; a simple gesture that could easily be mistaken as an involuntary movement caused by the gentle rocking of the train. But the two girls were close to one another, and frequently used little things like knocking their knees together on the train ride to school to communicate. Susan looked at Beatrice from the corner of her eye; it was also against the Abnegation ideology to look directly at somebody as the person being looked at might become uncomfortable. 

 

The train pulled to a stop outside of the school, and everybody started to disembark. When Beatrice got to the edge of the station platform, she stopped and half-turned so that she could watch. As the train passed the hillside that was directly to the right of the school, all of the Dauntless students jumped out from their car. They all rolled down the grassy bank, and it looked like a black mudslide. 

 

“What are you thinking?” Susan asked Beatrice in a gentle whisper as they started into the school. “Not Dauntless, for sure.”

 

“I don’t know,” Beatrice said with a sigh of frustration. “I suppose that I’m just going to wait for the test to tell me.” The truth was that she had been thinking about Dauntless. It certainly took a lot of courage to leave the faction that one was born into, so why not leave Abnegation for the bravest faction that there was? 

 

As they walked up the stairs, the other factions branched off to their own floors until it was only the Abnegation children left. Even though everybody went to the same school, the classes were divided by factions. Abnegation was on the top floor so that they wouldn’t have to burden any of the other factions with walking up all four flights of stairs. The only reason why factions like Dauntless and Candor even attended school was because the government mandated that children between the ages of four to sixteen must attend. Every single person in Erudite was behind the idea one-hundred percent, and explained that, just because some child wouldn’t grow up to join their faction, they didn’t want uneducated people running around the city. And with programs like cooking, family care, emergency aid, the Abnegation were quickly turned onto the idea of the idea as well. 

 

While Erudite was in charge of the majority of the classes, sometimes volunteers from Abnegation came in to teach the students classes such as sewing or cooking. Once, about a year ago, some Dauntless wanted to teach the students self defense. They claimed that it might help save a life if somebody was ever mugged. Abnegation and Candor were almost dead-set against the idea, while Erudite was divided on the issue. Talks to open up a separate building for self-defense lessons were still being discussed. 

 

When the Abnegation students got up to the last floor, the found four adults, one from each faction, waiting for them. “Welcome, welcome,” a woman from Dauntless said. “All students except for seniors, please make your way to your classrooms.” There was a moment as everybody else shuffled off to class, and left only about two dozen students who were going to undergo their aptitude test today. “As you are aware,” the woman started once the last door had closed. “Today is the day that you will be tested to see which faction suits you the most, and tonight, you will have to choose which one that you will spend the rest of your life in. The test will be a hallucinogenic simulation drug that will allow us to see how you would react in a number of different scenarios.” Beatrice let out a breath that she hadn’t known that she’d been holding. Whatever the other students had said, that sounded much less scary. “There are, however, only four machines for this floor, so we will call you in one by one. Please remain silent so that the others can hear their name being called.” No need to tell members of Abnegation that, but nobody was going to point it out to the lady. 

 

As the four volunteers took four students into the rooms to be tested, the group collectively decided to sit down on the floor to wait. “Susan Black,” somebody called from a room. Susan got up to go into the room, and Beatrice noticed that her friend was shaking like a leaf.

 

“Good luck,” Beatrice whispered under her breath, but she wasn’t sure if Susan heard or not because the other girl gave no indication. Beatrice tried to keep track of how long that the people were in the rooms. Some of them were in and out in a couple of minutes. Others went in and hadn’t come out by the time that somebody called her into one of the rooms. 

 

It was the Dauntless lady. The desks had all been shoved up against the far wall, under the windows, and a lounge chair sat in the middle of the floor. There was a bunch of equipment behind the chair. “Hello, Beatrice, I’m Tori,” the woman introduced herself. “The way that this works is that I’m going to inject you with this. It has a bunch of nano-computers inside of it, and it’ll transmit everything that you experience onto the monitor.” She patted the monitor in question.

 

“Will it hurt?” Beatrice asked as she eyed the giant needle Tori held up. 

 

“You might experience some mild irritation at the injection site later, but it’ll just be like getting your immunizations at the doctor’s office,” Tori explained gently. She motioned towards the chair. “Please, have a seat and we can get started.” Beatrice sat down, and Tori moved her braid away from her neck and stuck the needle in. It hurt a lot more than the last time Beatrice had gotten a shot at the doctors, but she wasn’t exactly going to say that. “It’ll just take a moment for everything to get started. Don’t think twice about doing anything; go with your gut feeling, Beatrice.” She could only nod; her head felt as if it was slowly being filled with cotton balls. 

 

The classroom was gone, and Beatrice found herself standing in the middle of the street. It was completely devoid of life, but, after a moment, she heard some rough shouts. “Hey, stop her!”

 

“HELP! Help me! Somebody please!” a woman screamed out. Beatrice immediately took off in the direction that the shouts were coming from. She found a man standing over a woman; he was holding a knife, and the woman was cowering on the ground. 

 

“Leave her alone!” Beatrice yelled at the man. The man turned away from the woman slowly and faced Beatrice. 

 

“Don’t worry, baby, there’s more than enough time for me to gut you, too,” he said.

 

“Leave her alone,” Beatrice said again. Her words sounded braver than she felt. “Just let her go, okay?” The man started to calmly saunter over towards where Beatrice stood. She looked around for a weapon, anything that she could use to defend herself with. There! At her feet was a brick. She quickly bent over and picked it up.

 

“Don’t take another step or else I’ll smash your head in!” Beatrice hissed as she shifted her weight into a stance that would give her a better chance against the creep. 

 

“You don’t even know what you’re doing,” the man sneered at her. He spun back around and went over to the woman. Before Beatrice could cry out, he slit the womans throat. While the man had his back to her, Beatrice ran up and started to smash the brick against his head. The first two hits didn’t seem to do much to hurt him (or at least, not as far as she could tell), but the third blow sent the man to his knees, and the fourth one made him fall face-first onto the ground. 

 

The man incapacitated for the moment, Beatrice turned her attention towards the woman. She was clutching at her throat and blood gushed out from between her fingers. “H-help…” The woman struggled to say.

 

“Shh, don’t talk,” Beatrice whispered as she dropped to her knees in front of the woman and quickly yanked off her shirt. She pressed the cloth over the wound. “HELP! Somebody, please! Help! We need a doctor!”

 

Beatrice awoke in the chair, gasping for breath. Her fingers were digging painfully into the padded armrests. “Easy there, it’s okay,” Tori said as she came around to face the younger woman. “You’re safe now. None of that was real.”

 

“W-what was that?” Beatrice stammered out. She was shaking badly and sweating profusely. 

 

“Your aptitude test,” Tori said. She pulled over the chair that she’d been sitting on around so that she could face Beatrice. “There’s something very important that I have to tell you, Beatrice.”

 

“What?” Beatrice’s stomach fell; that was never something that anybody wanted to hear. 

 

“You scored for all four factions with flying colors,” Tori explained. 

 

“What? No, that’s impossible,” Beatrice said with a firm shake of her head. 

 

“It is possible, it’s just highly unusual,” Tori said gently. “You might have heard of it before: Divergent.”

 

“Divergent?” Beatrice repeated the word blankly. Then the reality of what Tori had just said sunk in. “N-no! That’s not possible!” Divergents were only urban myths. People said that they were horrible monsters who only had one goal: to dismantle the faction system and overthrow the government. Beatrice didn’t feel like a monster at all. She just wanted to pick a faction— something away from Abnegation. She didn’t want to overthrow or dismantle anything. “Your test is wrong!”

 

“The rumors and myths are the things that are wrong,” Tori whispered harshly. “Divergents are people who have the potential to be in multiple factions at once. But, the danger posed to divergents is worse than the danger from divergents. You must never tell anybody about this unless you wish to die. My… My brother, he was a divergent. They found him, in Dauntless. They discovered this and they killed him.”

 

“Wait, that doesn’t sound right. Are you certain that he wasn’t killed for some other reason?” Beatrice asked sharply. “I… I mean to say, I’m sorry that your brother was killed, but to say that the cause of his death was that people discovered his divergence seems a bit… extreme.”

 

“I can’t explain it to you right now, but just know that I have proof that they killed him because of his divergence,” Tori said simply. “Dauntless is a very dangerous faction for you to go into, as they use the same hallucinogenic serum as part of the training. They will know that you’re a divergent almost as soon as that part begins. Erudite is also out, because, while they don’t use the serum, they are highly intelligent. They will notice that you’re not quite like them, no matter how hard that you try to fit in. And Candor is also a very risky move. In order to test the initiates into the faction, they give them a very extreme lie detector test. I’ve heard that it can go on for hours. It wears you out, and you’re more likely to slip up and say something that you shouldn’t.”

 

“So what should I do?” Beatrice said with some annoyance. “Be safe and stay in the safe faction that never rejects anybody? That I should spend the rest of my life handing out dinner rolls to the homeless?”

 

“That’s exactly what you should do if you don’t want to die a quick but painful death,” Tori said flatly. “You might think that this is some kind of a joke-”

 

“That’s not what I think at all. I think that there’s some kind of a mistake.”

 

“Beatrice,” Tori hissed as she got into the younger woman’s face. “I’ve been running the machine for the past five years now. I do not make mistakes. And, not once in those five years have I ever once seen anybody get more than one result.”

 

“Then your test is flawed and stupid. Some guy who slits the throat of a lady? What is that even supposed to mean?!”

 

“It’s a metaphor,” Tori said with some irritation. “Look, if you don’t believe me, fine. But don’t say that I didn’t warn you.” Tori then pulled a small knife out from her pocket. Beatrice recoiled in fear, worried that the woman was crazy and that she was going to hurt her. But Tori turned away from where Beatrice sat and used the knife to pry off a panel on the back of the machine. She then pulled out a small, flat piece of plastic— Beatrice recognized it as the device that store the computer’s memory— set it down on the table, and smashed it with the handle of the blade. “I’ll hand-record your results as being for Abnegation. Get out of here, because I have to fix the machine now.”

 

In a panic, Beatrice scrambled from the room. Tori stormed out from the room on Beatrice’s heels, but went into one of the other rooms instead.

 

A couple others were still waiting for their turn, looked up at Beatrice, confusion written on their faces. “The machine broke about a second after I finished,” Beatrice explained. The lie felt heavy on her tongue, but seemed to weight heavily on her heart. 

 

“It wasn’t your fault, Beatrice,” somebody said. Beatrice hung her head and hurried out from the hall. She practically ran down the stairs, which were currently empty as it was nowhere near the end of the school day. 

 

Once she was outside, she paused, uncertain of where to go. Home was a pretty safe bet, but if she went home, and if her parents were at home, too, from one of their various volunteer positions, they’d want to know why she was home from school so early. She didn’t want to have to lie again, especially not to her parents. And she didn’t want to have to talk to anybody.

 

Despite her misgivings about what Tori had said, something was not sitting right with Beatrice about the test. What had all of the other’s tests been like? Why wouldn’t somebody react in nearly the same way? Okay, sure, the longer she thought about it, she was certain that soft-hearted people like her brother wouldn’t have been able to knock the guy’s skull in with the brick. But why wouldn’t somebody confront a person who was about to attack a helpless lady? 

 

The only logical conclusion was that there was something inherently wrong with a test if it told Beatrice that she fit into all four factions at once and was a divergent. She was just a girl, barely over sixteen. She was not a monster.

 

Beatrice turned to go to the only place where nobody was going to be at the moment: the forum. It was where the factions met four times a year to discuss everything that needed to be addressed. But tonight, it would be where the sixteen year olds would pick which faction to join. Sometimes the forum was used by some larger groups to discuss things, but, since the choosing ceremony was tonight, there wasn’t supposed to be anybody scheduled for the space. 

 

It was empty, as promised. As Beatrice walked in through one of the doors, her footsteps echoed almost ominously in the massive, empty hall. There were four sections, for each of the factions, and they all converged downward towards the stage. At the moment, the four, massive bowls stood in the middle of the stage. The first bowl on the left was filled with grey stones that represented Abnegation. The one next to that wasn’t filled with anything, and the bowl was made out of a glass so purely transparent, from up at the top of the hall, it was almost as if it wasn’t there at all. Later tonight, as people choose to enter Candor, it would become red with blood. 

 

The third bowl was made from the same substance as the Abnegation one was and was currently filled with firewood; it would be lit before the ceremony. The final bowl was made from glass, but the glass had a slight blueish tinge from it. Even without looking too closely at it, Beatrice knew that it was filled with water. 

 

She walked about halfway down the steps and then moved to the middle of the row to sit down. She stared at the four bowls. What should she do? Tori had seemed certain that if Beatrice joined any faction other than Abnegation that they would find out about her divergence and kill her. She looked down at her hands. They were pale white, with faint blue-green veins that ran just under the skin. The lines on the palms were so familiar to her, she could draw them with her eyes closed. Her nails were cut short and there were some faint scratches on the back of her right hand from two weeks ago when she’d been trimming somebody’s rose bushes for her community service. 

 

She wasn’t a monster. There was no such thing as divergent. There was something wrong with the test if it so easily marked Beatrice down for all four factions. Being suited for two factions was impossible, so fitting inside of all four? 

 

She didn’t know what to do.

 

Beatrice wasn’t sure how long that she sat there. It grew dark outside, but she didn’t notice. People started to show up for the ceremony, but she didn’t move.

 

“Beatrice, we’ve been worried about you,” her mother, Natalie, said as she and her father noticed their daughter. 

 

“I’m sorry,” she said slowly. “I’ve been thinking.”

 

“You’d better get down to the front,” Andrew, Beatrice’s father, said. Beatrice stood, smoothed out the fabric of her grey dress, and moved slowly down to the steps. 

 

“Where were you?” Susan whispered as Beatrice passed her friend. 

 

“Here,” Beatrice answered simply. She walked down and took her seat so that they were all sitting in alphabetical order. 

 

The four leaders of the factions came up onto the stage. Beatrice knew Marcus Eaton quite well, since he and her father worked together quite frequently. She didn’t know much about Jeanine Mathews, but Beatrice had always thought that the woman was exceptionally cold and calculating; she never wanted to do anything unless there was something in it for her. Beatrice knew the leader of Candor by name only: Jack Kang. He was quite vocal with the things that he wanted for his faction, but the problem was that his faction hardly ever wanted anything. The final person up on stage was somebody that she’d never seen before. Thanks to the high-risk jobs associated within the Dauntless factions, the mortality rate was exceptionally high. And not even the people in office were immune from taking on those dangerous jobs. 

 

Marcus stepped forward to give the speech that one of the leaders gave every year. It was literally the same speech every year; Beatrice practically had it memorized, despite the fact that it was only given once a year. 

 

“Once again, we are here to celebrate the passage of time,” Marcus started. “Another group of children become adults on this day. With the passage of time comes an honored ritual to let each of our children choose the faction that they wish to spend the rest of their lives in.” He didn’t say that the likelihood of initiates in any faction other than Abnegation dropping out for any reason were exceptionally high. By the time that July rolled around, at least half of the sixteen year olds would be in Abnegation. Marcus went on to describe the qualities of each of the factions on some off-chance that somebody had somehow managed to grow up in the faction society but forgot all about the factions. 

 

Finally, one by one, the four faction leaders started to call out the names of those who would have to walk up to make their selection. It was a long and dull process, but Beatrice grew more and more anxious the further down the alphabet that the names got. She still hadn’t made up her mind. 

 

In a loud, clear voice that seemed to carry to the back of the hall, the Dauntless leader said, “Beatrice Prior.” On shaking legs, Beatrice stood and walked up the steps to the stage. The bowls seemed much larger up close— Beatrice could probably fit inside of them. Marcus silently handed her a small knife. She paused in slitting open the palm of her hand in order to give her a few more seconds to decide. 

 

She walked over towards the Abnegation bowl, but then kept walking past it. The knife cut into the flesh on her hand, and a couple drops of blood fell onto the stage instead of into the bowl, but nobody seemed to notice at the moment. As she headed off the stage in the opposite direction that she’d entered from, the Dauntless leader handed her a large bandage. “Welcome,” he whispered. His face betrayed no emotion. 

 

Beatrice sat down in a seat that had been abandoned when somebody had left Dauntless moments earlier. “Welcome,” a girl on Beatrice’s right said. She seemed much more friendlier than the leader had been. 

 

“Hi,” Beatrice said, and offered the other girl an easy smile. It was as if a massive weight had been lifted from Beatrice’s shoulders. She watched the rest of the ceremony with some mild boredom, and then stood as one with her new faction as soon as it was over. The new initiates followed the members up the stairs to the top of the building, but they didn’t leave through the doors like the rest of the factions were doing. Instead, they continued on up to the rooftop. 

 

Beatrice worried that they’d all gone completely insane when she heard the loud rumble of the approaching train. “Are they nuts?” the girl that Beatrice had sat next to asked under her breath. As the train came around the corner on the elevated tracks, the members were quick to jump into the cars; all of the doors were open and all were painted black for Dauntless. 

 

After a few seconds, the only people left on the rooftop were transfers. “Come on!” one of the members called back from a train car that was getting further and further away. Beatrice had been watching the Dauntless jump on and off the trains for about as long as she could remember. The fact that the track was elevated in this part of the town shouldn’t make any difference than the tracks that went past the school. She ran and made a leap for the open door of a car as it zipped past the roof.

 

She didn’t quite make it and her left foot slipped a little. Beatrice felt her stomach plunge down— she was going to fall to her death. Then somebody roughly grabbed her arm and yanked her inside. She stumbled and fell onto her knees, and then looked up to see the Dauntless leader pull in several other initiates who had also jumped. Although she didn’t know why, Beatrice was happy to see the girl that she’d been sitting next to had made it into the car. 

 

“Come on!” an initiate called out to somebody still on the roof. Beatrice got up and went to look. 

 

“This is nuts! I should have never picked Dauntless!” the boy called out. He was standing on the far edge of the roof, and in a few seconds, it would be too late for him to make it onto the train. And then the moment passed, and the boy got farther and farther away. Beatrice stepped back away from the door and looked around at the other initiates. She spotted the other girl standing near the back, and moved towards her. 

 

“I don’t understand,” Beatrice said to the girl. “This isn’t a test of bravery, but now, that boy is forced to join Abnegation.”

 

“The reason why we have the initiates jump on and off the train rather than to just walk them over to our headquarters is not to test their bravery,” a deep voice said from behind them. Beatrice jumped— she hadn’t realized that anybody was behind them. It was the leader of the Dauntless; she still didn’t know his name. Now that she was closer to him and had a moment to look at him, she realized that he wasn’t much older than she was; maybe a couple of years. 

 

“Then why?” she asked him. 

 

“It’s about physical endurance,” he explained. “Being in Dauntless is a very physically demanding experience. If you can’t jump on and off a moving train, then you’re probably not going to last very long in training. He should have realized that this is our preferred method of travel, and thought about that before he chose Dauntless.”

 

“You sound so heartless,” Beatrice said without really thinking. 

 

“Is it really heartless for him to find out now that he’s not cut out for Dauntless or in a week after he’s made friends and started to settle into the initiate rooms and then we have to kick him out?” the man quipped. Beatrice pressed her lips together but didn’t answer; there was no answer for something like that. “That’s what I thought.” He stood and started to make his way over towards the open door. 

 

He stuck his head out and a second later, the air was filled with the excited shouts of the Dauntless members as they jumped off the train. “Our stop is coming up,” the man said to everybody. “Get ready, or you can go join that young man in Abnegation tonight.” Beatrice shuffled forward to jump along with the others.

 

The rooftop that they would be jumping onto was a lot further from the elevated rails than the rooftop of the forum. It was also covered in gravel that dug painfully into every inch of Beatrice as she rolled across the surface. As Beatrice pulled herself to her feet, she noticed that the only other people who stood on the roof were the transfers. The only person from Dauntless was the leader. 

 

He strode past all of them and walked over to the edge of the roof. “Welcome,” he said to them evenly. He didn’t have to raise his voice— when he spoke, people listened. “As you might have already guessed, that was your first test in Dauntless. And if you thought that it was difficult, have I got some bad news for you: it’s only going to get a lot worse.” He motioned behind him; there was a large space between the edge of the roof where they stood and the next roof over. It was dark, and they could not see the bottom. “This is your next test.”

 

“What is?” somebody asked. “To jump off of the roof? Are you nuts?”

 

“I guess that we’ll just have to wait and see,” the man said with a mischievous glint in his eyes. His mouth didn’t betray him, and Beatrice wouldn’t have noticed the look if she hadn’t been watching him so carefully. “Who’s first?” After a beat and nobody had stepped forward, Beatrice did. “What’s this? The stiff is all a lot braver than the rest of you guys?” Beatrice felt her face flush, but she wasn’t quite certain if it was from anger or embarrassment. 

 

“We’re willing to sacrifice a stiff so that the rest of us might survive,” the same boy jeered. Some of the others were quick to agree. Beatrice marched over to the lip of the roof and looked down. Whatever was at the bottom, it was a long way down. She didn’t want to second-guess her decision to join Dauntless, so, she took a deep breath and simply stepped off from the roof. 

 

A startled scream burst from her lips as she descended. Her eyes closed in some strange desire not to see the ground— or whatever waited for her at the bottom of the hole. A second later, she fell onto something. It wasn’t exactly soft, but it had a massive amount of give to it. It smelt like plastic and storage. 

 

“Whoo, yeah!” several people cheered. Beatrice opened her eyes and found herself lying on a giant blow-up block. She’s seen the emergency crews use one of them about a year ago when somebody climbed up onto an old bridge and threatened to kill themselves. When he jumped down, the block was under him already, and he fell onto it and survived. 

 

Hands reached up and helped Beatrice get own from the block. Almost as soon as she was off, people started to work to inflate it again. “What’s your name?” a young man asked. He hardly looked a year older than Beatrice. She opened her mouth to respond, but he cut her off. “You have a fresh start here, but you only get one chance to introduce yourself,” he cautioned. 

 

After a moment of thought, she answered, “Tris.”

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, a bit of a strange story: Eric doesn't exactly have a surname, so I was just going to name him Smith or Rogers or whatever. Then, I was just looking at Jai Courtney's wikipedia page, looking at the list of movies that he's been in, and saw that somebody had listed "Eric Coulter" as the name of his character for Divergent. Okay, that is his name now? Either some overly zealous fan added it and nobody had any other proof that that wasn't his name, or the people who wrote the movie script gave Eric a surname.
> 
> But either way, Coulter is as good of a name as any, I suppose.

The hall that the Dauntless leader lead them down was dark and the floor uneven; Tris kept tripping over every little bump. Even though they had not been told to be quiet, none of them spoke. Finally, the man stopped in front of a door and turned around to face them. “For those of you who don’t know, my name is Eric Coulter. I am the newest of the Dauntless leaders, but I will be overseeing your training process. We take it very seriously here.” 

Eric turned and opened the door that he stood in front of. It lead into a room that had ten, narrow beds, five on each side. There was a small locker next to each of the beds. “This is the room where you will all sleep for the next few weeks. In the first stage of initiation, we keep the transfers and Dauntless-born initiates separate. This is because the Dauntless-born are already expected to have the physical and weapons training. However, you will both be ranked as a group.”

“Why are we ranked?” asked a girl from Erudite, Myra. 

“You are ranked because there are only ten positions available here in Dauntless. Only ten of the initiates will be made members.”

“What?” somebody hissed. 

“And, since there are eleven Dauntless-born and nine of you, most of you will end up in Abnegation,” Eric went on as if he hadn’t heard her. Tris looked around at the other eight transfers. With the leg-up that the Dauntless-born initiates had with their training, there was a pretty good chance that most of them would end up in Abnegation. This made Tris even more determined not to fail; there was no way that she could go back to Abnegation and face her parents after she’d left them, too. 

“If you are not in training, then you are free to do whatever you like. However, you are not allowed to leave the compound unless you are accompanied by a full-fledged Dauntless member,” Eric went on. He looked around at all of them; his gaze seemed to rest for the longest time on Tris before he finally looked away. “Are there any questions?”

“Why didn’t anybody tell us before now that there were only ten slots available?” a girl from Candor, Molly, asked.

“Why?” Eric sneered at her. “Would you have picked someplace else? If you don’t think that this is right or if you’re too afraid that you’re not going to make it, then you should probably just leave right now.” Everybody else remained silent. Eric offered them a twisted smile that was more frightening than it was friendly. “Welcome,” he said. “To Dauntless.”

 

* * *

There were ten beds in the room, and all but one of them were occupied. Tris lay in one on her back, and stared up at the ceiling. It was strange for her to hear the sounds of sleep around her. Even before her brother had left for Erudite, the two of them had had separate rooms. 

She didn’t want to think about her brother. Or her parents. Or Abnegation at all. But it was the thought that kept popping up in her brain. She didn’t want to go back to Abnegation and prove to the entire world that she didn’t have what it took to be considered good enough by Dauntless. If that happened, the only reason why her parents would even give her a home was because it would be selfish not to. 

She didn’t want to be a charity case to the people of Abnegation. She wanted to make her life here. She wanted to be brave, which was why she’d picked Dauntless over the other factions. 

Maybe Tris agreed with Molly a little bit. It wasn’t right that Eric hadn’t disclosed that Dauntless was only looking for ten new members this year, and all of the others would end up in Abnegation. But Eric had brought up a great point: doing the brave thing was picking Dauntless and choosing to stay, regardless of if anybody thought that they would make it or not. 

Tris briefly mulled over what she might be doing right now if she’d picked Erudite or Candor. It was very well-known throughout the city that Erudite’s test was mentally rigorous. If you weren’t smart enough, they’d cull you out and you’d be in Abnegation. She thought about Caleb. It was a year since he’d joined Erudite, so she supposed that he’d been deemed smart enough to become a full-fledged member, since he hadn’t come back to Abnegation. After all, there were hardly any secrets in Abnegation, since keeping them was selfish. 

With the thought that if Caleb was smart enough to get into Erudite, then she was tough enough to get into Dauntless, Tris rolled over and fell asleep. 

 

* * *

It felt to Tris like she’d barely gotten to sleep when she was awoken by the startling sound of a starter pistol. “Rise and shine, buttercups,” Eric said sarcastically from the door. He was still holding the starter pistol up into the air. “You each have one hour to run a lap around the compound. If you cannot do this, then you will go hungry until lunch.” Everybody stared at him from their beds. “Well?” he barked. “What are you waiting for? The longer you take to run, the more likely it’ll be that you’ll go hungry!”

Most of the others had changed into the black clothing that had been provided for them in the lockers. However, Tris had chosen to sleep in her Abnegation clothing since it was comfortable and familiar. She regretted that decision now, as she had to shimmy into a pair of pants and put on some shoes, while most everybody else just had to put on their shoes. 

Her lungs and calves were burning, but she thought that she hadn’t done too badly when she stepped into the dining hall. “Tris,” Eric said as she walked past him. He checked off her name on a tablet that he was holding. She kept her head down, didn’t make eye-contact with him, and walked over to where some of the other transfers were sitting. 

“We saved you some food, because we weren’t sure if you were going to be able to make it,” Christina said as Tris sat down next to the other girl.

“Thank you,” Tris said genuinely. “That was really nice of you.”

“Okay, you see that? It’s weird,” Christina said. 

“What? It was nice that you thought of me,” Tris said. 

“No, it’s weird that you thanked me instead of chastising me for thinking that you wouldn’t be able to complete the run in time,” Christina said simply. She gave an annoyed huff and shook her head. “You are still such a stiff.”

“And you’re being brutally honest, even when it’s not called for,” Tris pointed out. Christina narrowed her eyes as Tris.

“Touche,” she said simply. As Tris peeled the wrapped off from her giant muffin, she felt somebody’s gaze on her. She looked up sharply and saw Eric looking at her from where he stood in the door to the dining hall. Almost as soon as Tris looked up at him, he looked away, towards one of the other initiate trainers, Four. It might have been just a coincidence, since there were a lot of people in the room, and Four was speaking to Eric. Uncertain of what to make of that, Tris turned her attention back to her breakfast. “What do you think, Tris?” Christina asked.

“I’m sorry, what?” Tris said with a slight shake of her head. She’d been so focused on the fact that Eric might have been looking at her that she’d completely spaced on what the others were talking about.

“What do you think that we’re going to learn how to do first?” Christina repeated herself.

“I don’t know,” Tris said blankly. “The person who did my aptitude test was from Dauntless, and she mentioned that they used the same hallucinogenic drugs as part of the training.”

“Oh no, I don’t think that I could do that again,” Myra said sharply. “It was really scary.”

“How did you guys react to everything?” Tris asked, her voice low. “Did you all see the guy with-”

“-the knife standing over the woman?” Christina finished. The others nodded with agreement. “I just went straight over to him and started to yell at him until I woke up.”

“I found a brick on the ground and started to attack the man,” Edward said. 

Their answers seemed so simple to Tris that they almost didn’t seem right. “He didn’t cut the woman’s throat? Or try to attack you?” Tris asked. 

“He didn’t get a chance because I attached him first,” Edward said. Christina was about to respond as well when a loud commotion broke out by the door. 

“But it’s only a minute past!” Al protested. 

“And I said one hour, or else no breakfast!” Eric snarled at him. “Be faster tomorrow. Your hunger today should help you to remember.”

“I saved him some food, too, but now I’m afraid to give it to him,” Christina whispered under her breath to Tris. 

“Initiates, with me!” Eric barked from the door. The four of them stood and as they walked over to where he and Four stood, the others, Dauntless-born and not alike, joined them. “Four will work with the Dauntless-born today. All others, with me.” They broke off and Eric lead his group to a room that was filled with rows of desks. A box sat on top of a desk on the other side of the room. “Line up against the wall.”

Everybody scrambled to do as he asked, half-fearing what he might do if they didn’t do so quickly. Eric pulled a gun out from the waistband of his pants and held it loosely in his hand. He stalked slowly in front of the row of initiates, pausing to look each one in the eye. When he reached the end of the line, he spun around and started back the opposite way. Tris was unable to meet his gaze, her training from Abnegation overrode literally everything else. Once Eric reached the front of the line again, he went to stand before the group. 

“Guns are much more difficult to understand than most people think. These are exceptionally dangerous weapons, and should not be handled lightly. The first rule of gun safety is-” He broke off as Peter started to yawn loudly. Eric closed the distance between the two of them and shoved his gun into Peter’s face. It scared the yawn right out from the young man. Eric pulled the trigger; there was a faint click and a stick with a white banner that unfolded popped out. The banner read “BANG!”. “The first rule of gun safety is to never aim your gun at somebody unless you intend to shoot them,” Eric finished. He rolled the banner up and stuffed the stick back inside the gun. “And the second rule is to never put your finger on the trigger unless you’re ready to pull it.” He gestured towards the box. “Grab a gun. You will learn how to strip one and put it back together blindfolded. You will not move on to actually firing a gun until you are able to do this.” There was a brief pause in which nobody moved or said anything. “Well?” Eric barked. “What are you waiting for?”

 

* * *

That night, after dinner, Tris went back to the dorms with Christina. She noticed that Edward and Myra, both from Erudite, had taken the guns from earlier, and were practicing stripping them.

“Oh, that’s a really good idea,” Tris said. “I should have taken my gun with me, too.”

“What you should have done was to pick Erudite if you wanted to study during your free-time,” Christina scolded the blonde. “Personally, I want to check out the clothing shops that some of the Dauntless members told us about at lunch.”

“Look, I spent my entire life thinking about getting away from Abnegation, and now that I finally have a chance, I’m not going to blow it because I want to window shop,” Tris said. “And if you don’t want to end up washing the feet of initiates and feeding the homeless, you should, too.” Christina paused a moment to consider this.

“You’re right, but I really want to go check things out. I won’t stay too long and I’ll swing by the classroom to get a gun on my way back,” she said after a moment. Tris waited until Christina, Al, and Will left the dorm before she started out. Tris wasn’t sure that she could find the classroom from the dorm, so first, she went to the dining hall in order to retrace her steps from earlier. 

The dining hall never really closed, but started to serve different things at different times. After the approved “dinner hour”, it was apparently happy hour, as several older members sat clustered around some tables, laughing and drinking. The people in Abnegation never drank any sort of alcohol under any circumstance with the claim that it might lead to drunken behavior, which would be selfish of the drunk person who had to have other people take care of them. Also, if one started to drink a lot, then they would become an alcoholic, and there was nothing more selfish than a drug addiction. But as she looked into the dining hall briefly, she sort of wished that they had been allowed a drink or two; maybe then, things would have been much happier. After all, there was a reason why the other factions called them “stiffs”.

As Tris approached the room that they’d been in earlier, she saw that the light was still on inside. She paused before she got to the door and wondered if somebody had forgotten to turn the light off, of if somebody was in there right now. That gave her an even bigger reason to stop, because she was almost afraid to run into the strict leader and teacher, Eric. 

But the entire reason why she’d joined Dauntless was because she didn’t want to cower in fear anymore, so she strode over to the door and was about to push it open when she heard sharp voices inside. “I don’t care what she says; it’s completely abhorrent that she’d even think something like that,” Eric was saying. 

“But you’re not listening to me,” somebody replied sharply. Tris couldn’t quite place the other voice. 

“I’ve listened to your bullshit for long enough, Four. If you don’t shut your face, I’ll-”

“You’ll what?” Four interrupted. “You’ll shut it for me?”

“I’ll make you regret ever even thinking about joining up with this-” Their voices were getting louder as they got closer to the door. Tris scrambled back to make it look like she hadn’t just been eavesdropping on them. The door opened and Four and Eric stepped out. Four broke off in mid-sentence when he saw Tris standing there.

“Tris,” Eric said. Although his tone was sharp, the look on his face was not. “Can I help you with something?”

“Um, I was just looking to grab a gun to practice stripping,” Tris said quietly. 

“I put them away for the night, but you can use mine,” Eric said as he grabbed it out from the waistband of his pants. He pulled the clip out and held it out for her. 

“I can’t just take yours,” Tris protested.

“Stop being such a stiff and just take it,” Eric said. “I’ll just get another one.” After a moment when Tris didn’t move, he gave an annoyed huff, closed the distance between them, picked up her hand, and roughly slapped the gun into her hand. He stepped away from her quickly and half-turned away from her. “Goodnight, Tris.”

“Um… Goodnight,” she said hesitantly. She turned around and hurried back to the dorms. 

Tris sat on a bed with Myra; Edward sat on the one next to theirs and was facing them. All three of them were working hard to strip and reassemble their guns when Christina, Al, and Will came back into the dorms. Christina’s eyes found Tris, and she went over to the other girl.

“Where did you get the gun?” Christina demanded. “We went back to the room, but it was locked. And when we peered into the window, we couldn’t see the box there anyway.”

“Eric gave me his gun when I asked about practicing,” Tris explained, her fingers pausing over the grip pin. 

“What?” Christina blinked at the blonde. “So you mean to tell me that you just waltzed up to our tough-ass instructor, demanded a gun, and he just gave it to you?”

“No,” Tris said slowly. “He asked me what I was doing there. I said that I was looking for a gun. He said that he’d put them away for the night, but that I could use his.”

“That’s…” Christina started. She seemed to be at a loss for words.

“Strange? Unusual?” Myra prompted. 

“Yes and yes,” Christina said with a slight nod of her head. “But I was thinking more along the lines of ‘out of character’.”

“We barely know the man, not to mention the fact that he’s our instructor,” Edward pointed out. “How do we know that it’s not out of character for him? He could very well want for all of us to excel, even if he knows that we almost don’t stand a chance against the Dauntless-born.”

“There is something, though,” Tris said slowly.

“What?” Will asked.

“When I got to the classroom, he and the other instructor, Four, were talking about something.”

“Talking about what?” Myra asked with a slight frown.

“I don’t know; it doesn’t make any sense,” Tris said. “But Eric was angry about something that Four said, and Four wanted for Eric to listen to him, but Eric wouldn’t. They came out of the room then, and obviously stopped talking because of me.” 

They were all silent for a beat. Then, “Ooooh!” Christina exclaimed.

“What?” Edward asked with a look of worry in his eyes that she was about to snap.

“I’ll bet that Four and Eric are in some sort of competition,” Christina said eagerly.

“What do you mean?” Al asked.

“I mean that they’re both instructors, right? Four is working with the Dauntless-born and Eric is working with us. So they have this little friendly competition going on to see how many of their initiates that they can get to be full-fledged members.”

“Maybe, but it just doesn’t seem right when the odds are so clearly skewed in Four’s favor,” Myra said quickly.

“Which would be why Eric was so willing to give up his own gun to Tris!” Christina pointed out.

“There’s nothing special about this gun though,” Tris said gently. “It’s just like the one that I’d been working with all day today.”

“Are you sure?” Christina asked as she grabbed the half-stripped gun from Tris’s hands. “No special engravings or anything?”

“No, nothing like that,” Tris said, but Christina wouldn’t give it back until she’d examined every inch of it. 

“Aw, that’s too bad. I was hoping that it was some sort of romantic gesture on his part. He gave you the gun that had been his father’s or something.”

“That’s stupid; he wouldn’t just be carrying something like that around,” Edward pointed out. Christina simply shrugged and walked over to her own bed. She flopped down on her stomach and then rested her chin on her fist. 

“But anyway, Tris, Myra, you’ve got to come into the Dauntless town with me sometime. They’ve got some seriously cute clothes.”

“Are clothes the only thing that you think about?” Myra asked as she wrinkled her nose. 

“No, of course not; don’t be silly,” Christina protested quickly. “I think about makeup, too.”

 

* * *

Since everybody was anticipating Eric bursting into their room at the crack of dawn to make them run again, everybody slept in their clothes and put their shoes within easy reach. 

They were right. 

“Great job, Tris,” Eric said as Tris walked past him in order to get into the dining hall. “You’ve improved a few seconds from yesterday.” She looked back at him and watched as he did something on the tablet that he held. She was still slightly intimated by him, but after the strange encounter the night before, she was certain that there was another side to him that he hid from the initiates. After all, the Dauntless initiation was all about finding out who was the bravest and toughest. If he mollycoddled them, then it would be rough for the initiates to take him seriously. 

After breakfast, Eric lead them to a different room. Punching bags hung at staggered intervals all around the room, and there were mats on the floor and covering all of the walls. “Line up!” Eric barked, and they did as they were told. Like the day before, Eric paced in front of them and met their gazes. Tris tried to meet his gaze the first time that he passed her, but his steely glare was too much for her and she instead looked down at his shoes. She did not attempt to make eye-contact with him when he came back. Once Eric had passed everybody twice, he went to stand in front of them. 

“There will be times when either you don’t have a weapon, it doesn’t work, or, for some reason or another, you cannot use it. If you find yourselves in a situation like this, it’s important to have other means to defend yourself,” he explained. “We will go over technique today, and tomorrow, we will have staged fights against one another.”

Eric then turned and walked over to a punching bag. “Over here, were you can see me,” he said, and everybody hustled over to where he was. Eric named a few different punches and kicks. He demonstrated each one, first against the air, and then against the punching bag. “Everybody! To a punching bag and let me see what you’ve got.”

Tris walked over to one of the punching bags and began to tentatively hit it. The bag stings her hands and feet, and no matter how hard that she hits it, it barely moves. The room was filled with the sounds of skin against the punching bags and the occasional murmur of Eric giving one-on-one help to somebody. 

After a few minutes, Eric stops behind Tris. She hesitates as she feels his gaze on her, uncertain of what to think about it. “You’re doing okay, but I think that your biggest problem in a real fight will be your size,” he said. Tris couldn’t help herself and she gave him an annoyed look. “Not like your small stature is a bad thing. It’s just that most people are a lot bigger than you are. You’ll be facing people who are easily twice your size, if not more. Like Al or Peter.” Tris’s eyes widened and she looked over to where Peter was viciously pounding on a punching bag. 

Eric moved to block Tris’s view of him. “When you are up against somebody larger than you, it will be very important to try to immobilize them and put them on the ground. What you need to focus on is the knees. You hit somebody in the knees, and they’re not going to be able to get back up for a moment or to. This’ll give you plenty of time to get them subdued in other ways,” Eric explained. Tris nodded with understanding. He moved to stand next to Tris again and showed her a low, sweeping kick move that seemed fairly simple. 

He stepped back and Tris moved to try it out. “Okay, good,” Eric said with a slight nod. “Keep practicing that.” He moved off to help somebody else.

When Eric dismissed them for lunch, Christina caught up to the other girl. “That look that Eric gave you was really intense,” she said. “He scares the hell out of me.”

“He’s intimidating, that’s for sure, but I don’t think that he’d ever intentionally hurt one of us without reason,” Tris said carefully. 

Al, who’d been walking in front of them, turned around to face them once they got to the Pit. The Pit was the center hub of the Dauntless compound, and all hallways converged to the one spot. There was a waterfall, and the entire building had clearly been built around it as a focal point. There was only a rusty and extremely rusty rail that prevented people from falling over to their deaths, but, from what the others had heard, it was a popular spot for people to commit suicide. 

“I think that I want to get a tattoo,” Al said. 

“A tattoo of what?” Will asked from behind the girls. 

“I don’t know, but I’ve been thinking about it since we saw the tattoo shop last night,” Al said. “I want to feel like I’ve actually left Candor and stop crying about it.” There was a moment of awkward silence. “I know that you guys heard me these past two nights.”

“I think that you’re right,” Christina said as she poked Al in the arm. “If we want to be all the way in Dauntless, we should at least try to look the part.” Christina looked over to Tris. “Don’t tell us that you want to practice gun stripping again. Have a little bit of fun.”

“Don’t expect for me to cut my hair,” she said. “Or dye it a strange color. Or pierce my face. I’ll try to fit in, but I’m not sure if I’m ready for something like that.”

“How about if you pierce your bellybutton?” Christina asks with a laugh. 

“Or your nipple?” Will asked. Tris gave them an annoyed look. 

“Well, think about it,” Christina went on. “After all, we’ve still got until 6 when our training is done for the day.”

 

* * *

After dinner, the four of them went into the town, where the tattoo parlor was. For a while, Christina and Tris sat and watched as Al got a spider on his arm. The tattoo artist was more ink than actual skin, and it was a little bit unnerving to Tris. 

After a while, Christina went over to look through the book filled with pictures with Will. They elbowed each other whenever they saw a good one. 

Tris got up, too, but went over to look at the art that hung on the walls. Art was a strange concept for her, because Abnegation viewed it as impractical and excessive, and the time spent studying art in any way could have been spent helping others. She reached up to touch a drawing of a bird.

“It’s a raven,” somebody behind her said. “Pretty, right?” Tris turned her head and saw that it was Tori. Tris widened her eyes and Tori offered the younger woman a smile. “Hello there. I never expected to see you again. Beatrice, right?”

“Tris, actually. Do you work here?”

“Yes. I only just volunteer to administer the tests to get out of the parlor once a year.” She regarded Tris. “Weren’t you the first jumper?”

“Yes,” Tris agreed.

“Well done.

“Thanks.” Tris turned her attention back to the raven. “Listen, I need to talk to you about…” She looked over to Will and Christina. “Something. Sometime.”

“That isn’t wise,” Tori said quietly. “I did my best to help you, but you made your decision.” Tris doesn’t quite know how to respond to that. She knows that Tori has the answers that she’s looking for, but seems unwilling to tell Tris because she did the exact opposite of everything that Tori had told her to do. “Want a tattoo?” Tori asked. 

Tris looked back up at the picture of the raven. She hadn’t intended to get one, but as she looks at the drawing, an idea comes into her head. “I want something like this,” she said as she pointed up at the raven. “But with three.”

“Okay, where?” Tori asked as she went behind the counter to get a sheet of paper and a pencil to start to sketch out the design. Tris went over to the full-length mirror on the other side of the room and considered her reflection for a moment. 

She turned back to Tori and pulled down the collar of her shirt and tapped her left clavicle. “Right here,” she said.

“Okay, so sort of smaller?” Tori asked.

“Yeah,” Tris agreed. Tori sketched something for a moment, and then showed it to Tris. “It’s perfect.”

“Sit down, and we can get started,” Tori said as she motioned towards her work station. Tris settled into the chair and watched as Tori prepared the needle and ink. “Is there any sort of significance to this?” Tori asked as she pulled on a pair of latex gloves.

“I might not be able to see my family anymore, but I don’t want to ever forget about them,” Tris explained. Tori nodded with agreement. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope that everybody is enjoying it so far. I know that it's a lot of rehashing what we already know, but things will pick up in the fourth chapter, I promise!
> 
> Also, if you spotted any grammatical errors, please let me know so that I might fix them! Reviews and kudos are always appreciated.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, please let me know if you spot any grammatical errors.
> 
> Reviews are always appreciated.

After breakfast on the third day, Eric lead them into yet another room. Waiting in the room was Four and a woman that they don’t know. The room was a plain, cement room and the only adornments were a large mat in the center of the floor that had a giant, white circle all the way around it, and, embedded into the wall was an electronic board. As Tris looked closer at the board, she saw that there were five rows of names, and there was another name across from each of them. Tris’s name was at the very bottom, but the space next to hers was blank. 

“Ug, I’m up against the Tank,” Christina complained as she came up to stand next to Tris.

“Who?” Tris asked. She looked for Christina’s name, and found that she was facing off against Molly. 

“Peter’s slightly more feminine-looking minio… I mean friend,” Christina said with a cheeky grin. She motioned with her chin to the other side of the room where Peter stood with Molly and Drew. “The three of them have been inseparable since they were born. I hate them.”

“Alright, listen up!” Eric barked. The force of his yell made Tris jump a little. “As some of you might have noticed, I’ve been keeping track of how fast that you can run a lap around the compound. Today, we are going to start fighting. And tomorrow, when we go back into the classroom, I’m going to test every one of you to see how fast that you can strip a gun blindfolded. All three of these things will be added up to form a score. People with a low score are more likely to be cut at the end of the stage one training. Now, as far as fighting goes: Every fight will either help you to earn more points or will dock points off from your over-all score. If you defeat somebody who has more points than you, then your score will improve. To be defeated by somebody who has less points than you, and your score will decrease.” He looked around at everybody. “Any questions?” Molly raised her hand, and Eric gave her a rather annoyed “go ahead gesture”.

“How will we know what our ranking is?”

“You don’t,” Eric said simply before he half turned away from the group. “Al and Will!” The bark made Tris jump again. He pointed at the mat. “We haven’t got all day.” The two boys walked over to the mat and faced each other. “The fight is over if one of you is pushed out of the ring. You can do anything in order to achieve this end, but you will lose points for unnecessary cruelty. Begin.”

Will and Al both put their hands up in front of their faces to protect themselves, as Eric had taught them the day before. They start to circle around each other. 

“Do you think that this is a leisure activity?” Eric snapped at them after about a minute. “Should we break for nap-time? Fight each other!”

“But…” Al said as he straighted and put his guard down. “This is ridiculous! What’s the point of fighting him? We’re in the same faction!”

“Oh, you think that this is going to be easy?” Will asked with a cheeky grin. “Go on, then. Try to hit me, you slowpoke.” Al punched Will hard in the jaw. Tris winced, and she wasn’t the only one. Eric offered Al a smirk as he absently turned the ring in his eyebrow. 

Will stumbled to the side, his hand pressed to his face, and then blocks Al’s next punch with his other hand. Tris winces almost in unison with the look on Will’s face. Then, Will hooks a foot around one of Al’s legs and yanks hard; the larger boy tumbles to the ground, but then scrambles up to his feet. 

Al tried to hit Will again, but Will ducked. Will dodged another punch, spun around Al, and kicked him hard in the back. Al spun around and punched Will hard in the jaw. 

Will wobbled for a second in place before he fell over roughly. His bottom landed just on the other side of the ring; he missed landing on the cement by a millimeter. 

“Get him up,” Eric snapped. The board flashed and changed so that Al’s name was highlighted and Will’s was darker. Al helped Will to his feet; Will seemed slightly dazed, but he was awake and alert. “Now then, let’s do a run-down of the fight before we move on to Christina and Molly,” Eric said. The board changed into a video feed of the fight. Eric walked over to it and started to explain the things that Al and Will did right, and what they did wrong. He kept pausing it ever few seconds, rewinding it so that they could see one blow several times. It took about fifteen minutes to go over the fight, which had only lasted about a minute. 

 

* * *

That night, Tris has a nightmare where she fell into the chasm, but awoke before her body hit the wet rocks below. She sat up in her bed, covered in sweat, gasping for breath, and shaking badly. 

After a moment, she felt strong enough to stand, so she went into the girl’s bathroom to shower and change. After she’d finished, she went back into the dorm. Several people had heard her in the shower, and had risen to get a jump-start on their day before Eric came in with the starter pistol. Tris’s eyes went next to her bed and she saw that somebody had spray-painted “STIFF” across her bed in red. It was written smaller on the metal bed-frame and on the pillow. Tris’s hands curled into fists and she looked around the room. 

Behind her, Peter whistled a cheery tune as he fluffed his pillow. “Nice decorations,” he said. 

“Did I do something to you?” she demanded as she yanked the sheet off the bed. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re in the same faction now.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said blankly. “We’ll never be in the same faction.” Tris’s jaw clenched and her nostrils flared out. Before she could say or do anything, Eric burst into the room, starter pistol in his hand, ready to fire. He paused when he saw that most of the initiates were already awake, but then his eyes traveled to the red paint all over Tris’s bed. 

There was a beat of silence as everybody looked at Eric. His eyes trailed over everybody before they landed back on Tris’s destroyed bed. “Who did this?” Eric whispered. It would have been way less frightening if he’d yelled. The silence continued to stretch out. “WHO DID THIS?!” Again, nobody spoke. “Well then,” Eric said as he started to walk down the isle between the beds. “If nobody’s going to confess to the crime, then you will all be punished.”

“What? That’s not fair!” Molly whined.

“I never said anything about fair now, did I?” Eric spat as he got into her face. He straightened up. “All of you! Run laps around the compound! Do not stop until I tell you to stop! Maybe along your run, you’ll have time to reflect on why YOU SHOULD NOT DEFACE DAUNTLESS PROPERTY!” Everybody hustled out from the dorm, but Eric stopped Tris with a hand on her arm. “Not you,” he whispered. She kept her face down at her shoes. “Do you know who did this?” Eric asked once the door slammed shut behind the last person. 

“I don’t have any proof, but I think that it was Peter,” Tris said. 

“Of course it was,” Eric muttered under his breath before he turned his attention back to Tris. “Clean this up and get some breakfast.”

“But what-” Tris started.

“There isn’t a doubt in my mind that you’d willingly paint derogatory slurs onto your own bed,” Eric said, his voice even. “And if they’re willing to remain silent in order to let Peter get away with this, then they can all accept the punishment. Get going, or else the good muffins will be gone.” He left the room. 

 

* * *

It was no question that Tris was on the receiving end of a lot of angry glares as the transfers walked into the classroom about an hour later. They were mostly from Drew, Peter, and Molly, however. The others mostly just gave her a sympathetic look, but didn’t say anything. 

Eric roughly slammed the door behind him. “Line up!” he barked, and everybody moved up against the wall. Eric started to pace in front of them. “Every single thing that you see around you belongs to Dauntless. The guns that I so graciously let you keep to practice on? Dauntless property. The food in your stomachs? Dauntless property. The very clothes on your back?” He got into Peter’s face. “Dauntless property.” He pulled back and started to pace again. “If I ever so much as catch another one of you destroying Dauntless property again, you will become Abnegation faster than you can say ‘it’s not fair!’ TAKE YOUR SEATS!” 

They hustled past Eric; the only sounds were that of the movement of fabric and the scratch of metal chairs against the concrete floor. Eric started to pace in front of them again. “Now then. Gun stripping is something that is important. Your gun might jam in the middle of a firefight, and, of course you will need to take it apart in order to clean it.” He’d said the same thing three days ago. “Stripping a gun blindfolded isn’t exactly something that you will ever have to do out on the field, but it’s important that you know how to do it without looking at the gun. And you need to do so quickly. I will now call you one-by-one into the other room and I will time you. Once again, your time will go towards your total score.” He looked around at all of them. “Now then. Who’s first?” Nobody moved or made a sound.

Tris stood up. “I’ll go,” she said. Eric opened up a door off to the side and gestured for her to go through it. She walked past him and into the room. The room contained a single table and two chairs that were on opposite sides of the table. A gun and a long strip of black fabric sat on the table. 

“Have a seat, Tris,” Eric said as he shut the door. She sat and pulled the gun towards her. He walked up behind her, picked up the strip of fabric, and carefully tied it around her eyes. “Is that too tight?” he asked. 

“No, it’s good,” Tris assured him. 

“Good.” She heard him walk around to the other chair, pull it out, and sit down. Something rustled, and she heard a faint click, a beeping sound, a second beep, a third beep. “Whenever you’re ready, just say so. I’ll give you to the count of three, and then start the timer.” Tris nodded with agreement and took a deep breath.

“I’m ready,” she said. 

“…Three,” Eric said as he pressed the start button on the stopwatch. Tris’s fingers flew over the bits of metal and plastic; she pulled the gun apart, and then put it back together again. “Great,” Eric said once she was finished. “45 seconds.” Tris pulled the blindfold off and looked down at the gun in her hands before she looked up at Eric, who was recording her score on his tablet. 

“Is that good?” she asked.

“Yes,” Eric agreed. “Looks like that extra practice paid off. You can go now; send in the next person on your way out.” Tris got up and left the room; she felt Eric’s piercing gaze on her back until she’d exited the room. 

 

* * *

Tris had an uneasy feeling in her stomach as she stepped into the fight room the next morning after breakfast. She might have gotten lucky two days ago with not being partnered up to fight anybody, but there was no way that she’d go without a fight today. 

“Oh no,” Christina said as soon as she got a look at the board. “They can’t possibly be seriously. Are they really going to make you fight him?” 

Tris looked over to where Peter stood with a cocky grin on his face, and then her eyes went to Drew. Peter had beaten Drew with only a few punches, and today, Drew’s face was more black and blue than flesh-colored. 

“Maybe you could take a few hits and then step outside of the ring accidentally?” Al suggested. “Nobody would blame you.”

“Maybe,” Tris said with some unease. She was really annoyed that her friends didn’t seem to think that she was capable of fighting Peter.

Instead of remaining irritated at them, Tris turns her attention to the fight between Molly and Edward. As she watched them, her irritation gave way to nervousness. Eric had told them to exploit any weakness that their opinion might have, but as Tris thought about Peter, she couldn’t think of a single one. 

The more she thought about it, the more Al’s suggestion started to sound like a good idea. But the longer she mulled on that, the more she came to the idea that it would be a bad idea. After all, if she ranked last, she’d end up back in Abnegation. 

By the time that Eric had finished going over the fight between Edward and Molly, Tris is shaking like a leaf. She walked over to the mat. Peter offered her a cocky smile. Tris is certain that she’s going to throw up. 

“You okay, stiff? You look like you’re about to cry. I might go easy on you if you cry,” he taunted her. 

Over Peter’s shoulder, Tris saw Eric give the two of them an annoyed look. Like he has something better to be doing with his time than to watch a bunch of bratty children fight. 

“Come on, stiff,” Peter went on. “Just one little tear.” Tris’s irritation finally gets the better of her and she tries to kick him in the knees, just like Eric had taught her to do. However, Peter caught her foot and Tris roughly slammed onto the ground. Tris yanked her foot free and scrambled back onto her feet; she narrowly missed being kicked in the head. 

“Stop playing around,” Eric snapped at them. “I don’t have all day!” The smile on Peter’s face faded. Tris didn’t see his fist coming for her.

Dazed from the punch, she also didn’t see his foot until it had already connected with her stomach. The wind was completely knocked out of her, but Tris struggled to get to her feet anyway. 

Peter grabbed Tris’s ponytail and punched her in the face with his other hand. She felt a warm liquid drip down her face and vaguely thought that she was bleeding. A kaleidoscope of colors danced in front of her vision. 

“Enough!” somebody shouted. Tris was too out of it to tell who it was. 

 

* * *

When Tris woke up, it felt as if somebody had stuffed her head full of cotton balls. She opened her eyes and instantly regretted it; the overly-bright glare of where ever she was only made her head throb harder. 

“She’s coming around,” somebody said. Tris felt rather than saw the light grow dimmer, and she opened her eyes again. Will, Al, and Christina stood over her, half-blocking the light on the ceiling. Christina held an ice-pack to her jaw. 

“What happened to your face?” Tris asked. Her lips were difficult to use. 

“Look who’s talking,” Christina replied with a laugh. 

“I already know what happened to my face because I was there. Sort of,” Tris replied. 

“Did you just make a joke?” Will asked with a grin. “He obviously hit you a lot harder if you’re cracking jokes.” 

There was a lull in the conversation. Tris took the opportunity to look around her. She was in some sort of a hospital; there were two curtains that sort of boxed the bed that Tris lay in, to give the patients a little bit of privacy. 

“Don’t worry about Peter,” Will said after a moment. “He’ll at least get beaten by Edward. He’s been studying hand-to-hand combat for fun since he was ten.”

“Good,” Christina said. She checked her watch. “I think that we’re missing dinner. Do you want to stay here?”

“Yes, she will,” somebody said. A second later, a Dauntless woman dressed in what might pass for medical scrubs in Dauntless pulled back one of the curtains and stepped into the area. “She was hit so hard that she blacked out. I need to keep her over-night to make sure that she doesn’t have a concussion.” 

Tris leaned back against the pillow and let out an annoyed groan. “It’s bad enough that Peter put me in the hospital, but now you’re going to tell me that I have to stay overnight?”

“Yes,” the nurse snapped. She pulled a penlight out from her pocket and used it to check the reaction of Tris’s pupils. “Although, it is a good sign if you’re being argumentative at least.” 

“We’ll come and see you later, if you’re feeling up to it,” Christina said as she, Will, and Al started to head for the door. 

“Yeah, okay,” Tris agreed. “Later.”

 

* * *

It felt like every time she finally fell asleep, the nurse would wake her just to ask her a bunch of questions. She said that it was to make sure that Tris was really okay. Going only by the annoyance in her voice every time this happened, Tris believed her. 

Right now, the room was dark; the only light came from the emergency light that was over by the door. The nurse turned the light on every time that she woke Tris up, so Tris knew that it wasn’t the nurse that had awoken her this time. A small movement at the end of her bed then caught her attention. Eric put the electronic tablet that contained Tris’s medical information back in the slot at the foot of the bed. 

“The nurse says that you’re going to be okay,” he said as he came around to stand by the side of the bed. 

“Yes, but you didn’t come here just to tell me that,” Tris replied. She knew that she was the only one in the Dauntless hospital at the moment, but she still kept her voice low. There was something about being alone with somebody in the dark that made her want to whisper. 

“No,” Eric agreed. He picked absently at some dirt under his nails. “I should have stopped the fight sooner, and I’m sorry for that. It’s important for you to learn how to fight and to not need somebody to back you up. You don’t know if backup will be coming. Sometimes, they don’t. But at the same time, you are my student and under my care.”

“Peter is set on antagonizing me,” Tris said after a moment. 

“I know,” Eric said roughly. “There isn’t much that I can do about it, though. Four, Lauren, and myself looked into the defacing issue from yesterday, but we determined that there wasn’t much that we could do about it. Even you admitted to me yesterday morning that you had no proof.” Tris hummed with agreement. “And there’s nothing in Dauntless’s legal system that says that you can’t call people names. Mean, yes, but it’s not illegal.”

“It’s not so much the name-calling that’s bothering me. It’s the personal vendetta that he’s got against me that’s worrying,” Tris said flatly. 

“I’m going to take you under my wing and personally train you,” Eric said, without meeting Tris’s gaze. 

“What?” she gasped. “Is that allowed?”

“It is,” Eric agreed with some irritation. “The other initiates might not like it, but you’re certainly not going to be the one to tell them, now, are you?” He glared at her. 

“No,” Tris stammered out.

“Good. We’ll start tomorrow evening, after dinner. Do not be late.” He turned to leave.

“Wait,” Tris said, and held out her hand, as if to grab for his sleeve. But he was too far away for that, and she awkwardly dropped her hand back down onto the bed. He paused, but did not turn around to face her. “Why me?”

“I know that look in your eyes, Tris. The look of pure determination. The look of wanting to prove to the world that you made the right decision. Because people look at you, and they see a wimpy, little girl from Abnegation who made a mistake,” Eric said. His voice was so low and chilling that it sent a shiver up Tris’s spine. She wasn’t sure if it was from fear… or something else. But there was something else in his words, something a bit more personal. Tris wondered what it was, but she was too afraid to ask. “You need your rest, so I will take my leave now. Do not forget. Tomorrow, after dinner. If you are late, consider this agreement null and void. Good night.” 

 

* * *

The next morning, they spent the first fifteen minutes following breakfast practicing gun stripping. The entire time that they were in the classroom, Eric prowled up and down the rows of desks, making sure that everybody was focused on the task at hand. 

Tris had barely had any time at all to process the strange, almost one-sided conversation that she’d had with Eric with night before. She focused all of her attention on the gun in front of her and made like she wasn’t overly aware of where he was in the room at any given moment. 

“Alright, wrap it up!” Eric barked. As everybody scrambled to finish reassembling their guns, Eric went on. “Tomorrow, we’ll get to target shooting. As you might imagine, this will also be scored. Come on! Move it! We don’t have all day to linger in here!”

The group walked next door to the fighting room. Despite the head injury that Tris sustained the day before, she didn’t expect that she would be excused from fighting today. She glanced up at the board almost automatically as she stepped into the room, and saw that she was paired up with Myra. 

Myra was the only other initiate who was around the same size that Tris was. Despite this, the two of them couldn’t possibly be any more different, personality wise. It was painfully obvious from the first morning that they were in Dauntless that Myra had only joined the faction to be with her boyfriend, Edward. Tris tried not to think too harshly about her and her heart-driven decision, but it was hard not to. After all, they were only just sixteen, and they had their entire lives ahead of them. Why in the world would she willingly join a faction that she clearly did not have an aptitude for just to be with a boy?

The fight didn’t last too long. Tris hit Myra twice and Myra stumbled out of the ring accidentally. 

As the day progressed, Tris began to feel more and more apprehensive about her training session with Eric. By the time that Eric dismissed them for the day, her stomach was completely in knots. She felt like she was going to be sick. 

“Are you okay, Tris?” Al asked with some concern after he noticed that she was just picking at her dinner. 

“Is it Peter, still?” Christina asked. 

“Um, yeah,” Tris said absently. She was grateful that there was another reason why she would be worried and distracted, so that her friends wouldn’t notice that anything was amiss. But as she took a bite of her burger, she realized that she was going to have to give her friends some excuse to why she’d have to leave them. 

In the end, she didn’t have to really use one at all. “I want to go shopping!” Christina said once they were finished eating. She linked arms with Will, and tugged on Tris’s arm to link up her other arm. 

“I’m just not really feeling up to it right now,” Tris said. “I think that I’ll just stay here.”

“Okay, we’ll see you later,” Christina said without hesitation. But, since the town was in the same direction as the dorms were, Tris had to walk along with them, at least until the path split off. Then, Tris doubled back and went into the training room. 

She paced around the room for a moment when she got in there. It was still a bit early, if the clock on the electronic board on the wall was correct. Then, Tris walked over to one of the punching bags and started to practice the low knee-kick that Eric had shown her the other day. 

After several minutes, Eric burst into the room. “Sorry I’m late, there was…” He trailed off and gave Tris a look that she couldn’t quite read. He was obviously a little embarrassed because he’d been about to tell her some important, Dauntless secret or something. “Never mind.” He walked over to the board and started to sort through of the fight footages. Tris walked over to stand by his side. After a moment, Eric brought up the footage of Tris’s fight with Peter from the day before. “Since you were unconscious when I went over it before,” Eric explained. 

They spent the next couple of minutes going over the footage, and Eric made sure that Tris understood what she’d done wrong and what she might do better in the future. “You had a good fight today, but it’s very clear that Myra is not cut out for Dauntless. Just because you won against her is no indication that you’re going to be able to win against anybody else.” He cleared his throat. 

“However,” he went on. “While it’s good to study your past mistakes, it’s a lot easier to put something like this into action.” He dismissed the footage and the screen went back to the clock. Eric motioned Tris over to the mat; he followed her over and stood across from her. He put his hands up into a defensive position; Tris mirrored his movement. “What are you waiting for?” he barked at her. “Hit me!”

“What?” Tris said blankly. Her hands half-fell down to her sides. 

“Do you honestly think that you’re going to get any better without throwing a single punch? You aren’t going to hurt me; don’t worry,” Eric said with some annoyance. Tris put her hands back up and lunched for Eric. He moved out of the way and caught her fist in his hand. “Move faster, put more energy into your punches!”

Tris pulled back to reorient herself for a second before she lunged for Eric again. Once more, he caught her punch against the palm of his hand. “Better!”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, please let me know if you spot any grammatical errors.
> 
> Reviews and kudos are always appreciated.

“Tomorrow is the last day of physical training,” Eric said to Tris one evening, about a week after the Choosing Ceremony. “We’re going to move on to the section stage after that.”

“I’m glad,” she said with mixed emotions. She was happy to finally be moving on, but a little torn about stopping her one-on-one training sessions with Eric. Even though he came into the room and was all business, she thought that it allowed her a brief glimpse into who he was when he wasn’t being a hard-ass initiate instructor. 

“Don’t get excited too soon,” Eric said, and he flashed her a cocky smile. “The second stage is a lot different from the first one, but it takes a different kind of bravery.” 

Tris nodded with agreement while her stomach tied itself into knots. Was this more of the simulation serum like they had used for the aptitude test? Maybe she hadn’t thought this through enough. Tori’s words rang through her head. 

“Dauntless is a very dangerous faction for you to go into, as they use the same hallucinogenic serum as part of the training. They will know that you’re a divergent almost as soon as that part begins.”

Then, Tris’s mind wandered to Tori’s brother. Had the government really found out about his divergence and killed him? Or was it all just Tori being upset because her brother had died in combination with malicious rumors?

“Hey, stiff, I’m talking to you,” Eric said. He playfully punched Tris’s shoulder. “Don’t check out on me now, okay? You still have one fight tomorrow, so let’s get to work.”

“Right, sorry,” Tris said. She walked over to the mat and put her hands up in a defensive position. 

 

* * *

Tris’s head barely touched the pillow when the door to the dormitory was thrown open. “EVERYBODY UP!” somebody roared. The beam of a strong flashlight moved across Tris’s face, but after it had moved away, she saw that it was Eric. Four stood behind him, and the other initiate trainer, Lauren, stood between the two men. There were a couple of other Dauntless people that Tris didn’t know standing amongst the three trainers. “You have five minutes to get dressed and meet us by the tracks. We’re going on a field trip.”

Tris jammed her feet back into her shoes and then took off running behind Christina. They run past a group of Dauntless people as they pass through The Pit, but none look overly surprised to see them. They must see a lot of frantic, running people in Dauntless. 

The group of transfers arrives on the train platform just behind the Dauntless-born imitates. A pile of guns lay next to the tracks. 

“Are we going to shoot something?” Christina asked Tris. 

“Everybody grab a gun!” Eric shouts. As they get closer to the pile, they see that there are boxes of ammunition stacked next to the guns. A single word is printed on the side of each box, “Paintballs”. It was a foreign word to Tris, but it seemed pretty self-explanatory to her what they were. She picked one of the guns up— it was a lot lighter than she would have expected for it to be.

“Listen up!” Eric barked out. “We’re going to divide into two teams to play paintball! Each team will have an even mix of Dauntless-born and transfers. We’re going to pick teams, get on the train and head into the center of town to play.” 

Four held up a vest; it was unlike anything that Tris had ever seen before. There were dull, blinking lights all over it. “Eric and I are going to be the team captains. When one of us calls your name, step forward and receive one of the vests from your team captain. My team is green while Eric’s is orange. Do not forget this. There are sensors in the vest that let you know when you’ve been hit. If you get hit enough, the lights on your vest will go off. When this happens, you are out of the game. 

“The goal of the game is to hit as many people on the other team until they are out but not get hit yourself,” Eric went on. 

“This is a Dauntless tradition, so I suggest that you take it seriously,” Four said. 

“Let’s divide up the transfers first, shall we?” Eric said as he looked over to Four. Tris breaths out through her nose with annoyance. During the mandated gym classes in school, she was almost always picked last. She didn’t think that being in Dauntless was going to change that.

“You go first,” Four said.

“Tris,” Eric said calmly and without hesitation. 

“What are you doing? You normally do the exact opposite thing when we play paintball,” Four said as Tris walked over to where Eric stood. “Or have you decided to pick all of the weak ones so that you have somebody to blame when you lose?”

“Something like that,” Eric said as he handed Tris a vest and a pair of goggles. She put both of them on as Eric and Four divided up the rest of the rest of the initiates. 

Almost as soon as Four had handed the last vest to the Dauntless-born on his team, the air was pierced by the sound of the train horn. 

As it came around the bend, everybody got ready to jump onto it. Four ran up ahead and threw open the doors to the first Dauntless car before he jumped on. Tris jumped on next; Four caught her arm and yanked her in. She went to sit down as far away from the door as she could possibly get. 

They rode for a while, the only noise that of the clacking of the train as it moved along the elevated rails. “Your team can get off second,” Eric said after a moment.

“Don’t do me any favors,” Four bit out. “You know I don’t need them to win.”

“I know that you’ll lose, no matter when you get off,” Eric said. A coy smile spread across his face. “Take your stupid team and get off first, then.”

The train started it’s gentle descent towards ground-level. Before they could fully even out, the train went into a tunnel. The car was plunged into sheer darkness, the only lights were the faint, blinking green and orange lights on the vests that everybody wore. 

“Alright, let’s move!” Four barked out as soon as they left the tunnel. Christina gave Tris a forlorn look before she jumped off after Four and the rest of his team. 

About a minute after Four’s team had left, Eric said, “Alright, let’s move out!” 

As Tris tried to jump off, somebody roughly shoved her shoulder, which almost caused her to fall out of the car. She doesn’t look back to see who it was, but she has a sneaking suspicion that it was Molly, Drew, or Peter. Before they could try it again, she leapt off from the train. 

Tris didn’t recognize the area where they were, but all of the buildings flew the blue and white Erudite flag, so Tris guessed that it was in the middle of their territory. It seemed like an odd decision to come to this area to have a paintball war. The Erudite weren’t exactly well-known for being overly forgiving. 

“Listen up,” Eric hissed. It was dead quiet, and his voice carried, even though he spoke in a whisper. “The point of this exercise is to work on team building. We work as a unit, or else we lose. If I find out that any one of you shot at one of your comrades, you will be running laps until this time tomorrow. Do I make myself clear?” They all murmured out their agreements. Tris thought that she saw Eric’s eyes flick over to where Peter, Molly, and Drew stood, but she couldn’t be sure. “Good. Let’s move out!” 

As a group, they started to move through the streets as silently as they could. Even though the streets were exceptionally clean, everything was dark because of the mandated, city-wide lights out time in order to conserve energy. “Gah!” somebody gasped after they’d been walking for about a minute. Her startled cry was followed by everybody else shushing her. “Sorry, I tripped over something! It’s so dark here!”

“Scared of the dark, Mar?” somebody asked in a teasing way. 

“Shut up,” she sneered in response. They continued to walk in silence

“Okay, hold up,” Eric said after several more minutes of walking through the dark without incident. “In the past, Four’s team has broken off into smaller groups for a well-planned attack on my team. A group of three or four come at us from the front in a Kamikaze attack, and while we’re all distracted by that group, the rest of his team comes up from behind us. We’re so distracted by the front attack that we don’t even notice the rear attack until it’s too late.”

“So if that’s the plan, then we should do the same thing, too,” Tris pointed out. 

“Explain,” Eric said gruffly. 

“If Four’s plan is to pick us off as a group, then we shouldn’t be together as a group,” Tris elaborated. “Especially not if we’re going to be sitting ducks. We break off into smaller groups, too, so that if we come across a group of people from Four’s team, we might have a chance of surviving the fight.”

“Yes, it’s a great plan until a group of three comes across Four’s second, larger group,” Drew pointed out sourly. 

“I think that it’s a good plan,” Eric said, and cut off anything negative that the others might have had to say. “Uriah, Lynn, and Tris, head out that way. Drew-” Tris moved away before she could hear who was in the other team with Peter. She was just happy that Eric hadn’t put her in a team with Peter. 

The direction that Eric had pointed them down was a long alley that opened up onto another, equally dark street after about a mile. As they crept down the alley, keeping to the darkest shadows thrown by the buildings on either side, they passed several other shoot-outs where the path that they walked down joined up with and branched off from others. The three of them kept to the main path that they’d originally started down. 

When Lynn, walking in the lead, was about a foot away from the end of the alley, they heard a faint pop-pop-pop of gunfire, followed by an annoyed “Aw, come on!” Lynn, Uriah, and Tris pressed themselves deeper into the shadows. A second later, three people wearing vests that blinked green ran past their hiding spot. A beat later, Lynn waved both Tris and Uriah forward. The three of them ran silently up on the other team and plastered them with paintballs until all three of their vests went dark. 

“Hey, come on now,” Christina complained as she wiped a smudge of purple paint off from her safety goggles. 

“Sorry!” Tris called out to her as her group took off running in the direction that the other group had been going in. They ran for a few minutes until they met up with Myra. She was completely covered in paint, and her vest had been turned off.

“They got me,” she said sadly. 

“How many were there and which way did they go?” Lynn asked. 

“There were a bunch of them; it all happened so fast,” Myra said. “My teammates took off, and left me to die. I know that I’m a weak link, but Eric was talking so much about teamwork and it just makes me angry!”

“Who was on your team?” Tris asked.

“Peter and some Dauntless-born. I forget his name,” Myra explained. Tris clutched at her gun in anger. She wished that Four had picked Peter for his team instead of Eric, so that she could personally “kill” him herself. But, there wasn’t much that she could do about that right now. 

“Which way did Four’s team go?” Lynn pressed the other girl again. 

“That way,” Myra said. “Do you think that anybody would mind if I just went back to the compound now?” 

“Probably not, no,” Uriah said as they took off running again.

“Arg, it’s going to take forever to get this paint out of my hair,” they heard Myra complain before they were out of earshot. 

After about two minutes of running, Lynn slowed down and eventually stopped. “How far do you think that we’re supposed to go?” she asked them. 

“He didn’t say,” Tris said with an absent shrug. 

“When we played paintball before, we normally had to stay within the section of the city that we got off in,” Uriah said. “But as Tris said, Eric didn’t give parameters this time.”

“Maybe he thinks that we’ve outgrown the kid gloves?” Lynn suggested. They walked towards the end of the block, but before they got to the corner, Lynn held her fist up to stop them once again. She peered around the corner and then laughed. “I didn’t think that we’d see you guys again until this was all over.” 

Marlene, Drew, and Eric came around the corner. There was a smudge of paint on Eric’s vest, but it obviously hadn’t been enough to turn the lights on his vest off. “Did you get anybody?” Marlene asked. 

“We got three, and ran into Myra, who’d been killed,” Lynn explained. “Apparently, her own team abandoned her.” Eric gave an annoyed sigh. 

“I will deal with them later,” he said with some irritation. 

“Hey, how far are we supposed to go?” Uriah asked. “You never said.”

“The entire city is a battlefield,” Eric said. 

“What? But the city is huge! We’ll be out here all night!” Uriah hissed.

“If we ever get into a real battle, do you honestly think that those attacking us will stick to one section of the city?” Eric said evenly. 

“Huh, I hadn’t thought about it like that,” Uriah said. “But this-” He broke off abruptly when Eric held his fist in the air for silence. Nothing but the usual night sounds. 

And then, behind Tris, the gentle shuffle of people approaching. Eric listened for a moment, held up three fingers. Then, he motioned at Lynn and Uriah, pointed them to the left; Drew and Lynn were motioned to the right. After all four of them had silently backed away, Eric and Tris crept forward towards the corner where the sound was coming from. 

Tris waited, hardly daring to breath, for Eric to give her the signal to move. The footsteps got closer and closer. Obviously, whoever it was was also being cautious, especially when approaching the corner. Maybe they’d seen their shadows or had heard Uriah’s overly-loud voice. Eric motioned to Tris, and they jumped out around the corner.

The only thing that Tris registered was that the lights on the vests were green. She pulled the trigger to splatter them with paint. Somebody hit her on the arm with a paintball, and she recoiled from the pain a little bit. A second later, the other four joined them and quickly knocked the two from Four’s team out. 

Once it was over, Tris realized that one of the other players was Four himself. “Well, you got me,” he said as he pulled his goggles off, since they were completely covered in paint to the point where he could no longer see through them. 

“How is your team doing?” Eric asked. Four pulled out a small tablet and checked it. There was a map of the city, and several dots on it that represented the initiates. There were only two different colors: orange and grey for the ones who had been taken out from the game. 

“What?” Four gasped. “How could your team have taken out all of mine in about half an hour?”

“Should have let us get off first,” Eric said blankly. He slung his gun casually over his shoulders and rested his hands on either side of it. 

“I hope that you’re happy,” Four growled out as the eight of them started towards the nearest train station. 

“I am quite happy,” Eric said with a smug grin on his face. Tris can’t help but smile, too. At the station, they have to wait a few minutes for the train to arrive. As they wait, Eric put a hand on Tris’s shoulder. “Well done.”

 

* * *

Life went on the next morning. Eric came in at the usual time and told them to run a lap around the compound within the hour. Nobody seemed to realize that today was the last day of stage one. No more fights after this. Tris still felt apprehensive about using the simulation serum again, and, once again, thought about Tori’s words. About her brother. Eric would probably watch her simulation, for however they train them in stage two. Would he notice that Tris was divergent? Would he care about that?

“Tris!” Eric barked out in the training room. “Pay attention!” 

“Right, sorry,” she said quickly as she stepped over to the mat. She couldn’t afford to think about her divergence and what come next, because she still had to get through her fight with Molly. 

After dinner, when the group went back to the dorm, they instantly noticed the electronic board that now hung on the wall opposite the door. “What? Our rankings?” Christina gasped as they hurried forward to see them. 

Edward was first, followed by Peter, and then Will. Tris was fourth, and Christina fifth. Upon seeing her name in the top five, Tris let out a breath that she hadn’t known that she’d been holding. She was safe. Even though some of the initiates would be cut at the end of stage one, she would be safe. 

Her eyes went down the rest of the list: Molly, Drew, Al, and finally, Myra. Her stomach almost dropped when she saw how low that Al was ranked. He was going to be cut for sure. 

“What?” Molly demanded. Tris hadn’t even been aware that the others had come into the room as well. “I beat her!” she roared as she motioned towards Christina. “I beat her in minutes and she’s ranked above me?!”

“Yeah,” Christina said with a smug smile. “And?”

“If you wanted to have a higher ranking, maybe you shouldn’t have lost so much to lower ranked opponents,” Eric said from the other side of the room. Molly’s face flushed with anger and she turned and stormed out from the room. 

Tris looked at Peter, a little surprised that he was being so quiet. He just sat down on his bed and started to take his shoes off. It was more unnerving having him be so quiet, because he complained about everything, and it set Tris on edge. 

Will clapped Tris on the back. “Look at you, number four,” he said. “We should celebrate!”

“Let’s go then,” Christina said. She grabbed Tris’s arm and Al’s, but Al yanked his arm out from her grasp. “Come on, Al. You don’t know how the Dauntless-born did.”

“I’m just going to go to bed,” he mumbles as he shuffled away. Tris pauses for a second, watching as Al lays face-down on his bed. 

“Come on,” Christina said, and tugged Tris out of the dorm. Once they’re out in the hall, on their way into the town, it’s easy for Tris to put Al, Molly, and Peter out from her mind. And, just for one second, she was able to put Tori and the imminent threat of being discovered as a divergent out of her mind as well.

However, all of those thoughts came back to her as soon as it was time for bed. Tris lay on her back and stared up at the ceiling, which she could just barely make out in the dark. She listened to the sound of the eight others, and thought about how she used to find their sounds of sleep overly loud. Tonight, things were quiet. Much too quiet. 

Thoughts, worries, about what tomorrow might hold swirl through her head, and she knows that any sleep that she can get will be troubled until she has reassurance that everything will be okay. 

A slight sound on the other side of the room sets Tris on edge. The room is too dark for her to see clearly— her eyes might as well be closed. 

The slight shuffle of fabric. The squeak of a show. A heavy thud.

A blood-curdling scream. It makes Tris’s hair stand on end. “Turn on the lights!” somebody shouts. As the light comes on, the first scream is joined by a second, more high-pitched scream. 

Before Tris can even process what’s happening, she threw back her blankets and leapt out of bed. Edward lay on the floor next to his bed, clutching at his face. Blood poured through his fingers, and the source of the blood was instantly obvious: a butter knife stuck into his eye. Myra stood on the other side of Edward’s bed, screaming and screaming. Edward had fallen silent, but he’s still scrambling at the skin around his eye. 

“Be still,” Tris commands Edward as she knelt down by his side. Her words have an odd calm about them; she feels very detached from the situation. “BE STILL. Breathe.”

“My eye!” Edward sobbed. “Take it out! Get it out! Get it out!”

“No, you have to let the doctor take it out. Breathe, just breathe.” She rubs her hand almost absently over his shoulder. 

“It hurts,” he sobbed. 

“I know, I know,” she whispered over and over. “It’s going to be okay.” A minute later, two nurses rush into the room with a gurney. Tris stepped back to let them remove Edward.

She had to look away, worried that she was going to be sick if she looked at the puddle of blood that had pooled under where Edward had been lying. As she does so, she realizes that two people are missing: Drew and Peter.

Nobody got much sleep after that.

 

* * *

It was strange in the morning to not be awoken by Eric yelling at them to run around the compound or go without breakfast. “Do you think that we’re not going to have to do any more running?” Will asked as they walked to breakfast slowly. 

“I want to say no, but I have no idea what’s going on,” Tris said. “Something doesn’t feel right.”

“Yeah, like Peter stabbing Edward in the eye and then running away like a coward,” Christina sneered. Tris was about to say that they didn’t have any proof that it had been Peter, but the words died on her lips. She wasn’t about to sit and defend the creep. 

When they return to the dorm after breakfast, both Edward’s and Myra’s beds have been stripped. Their lockers are empty, and all of their things are gone. “Where did they go?” Tris asked the older Dauntless man who was bundling up the last of Myra’s things.

“They quit,” the man said simply. 

“She knew that she would be cut anyway,” Christina said absently. “Probably thought that it would be best to leave now.”

“Who else got cut?” Tris asked.

“A couple of Dauntless-born,” the man said on his way out the door. Tris looked over to the board. Myra’s and Edward’s names had been removed and the numbers had been changed to reflect the shift. Tris was now third. 

 

* * *

Nobody comes to tell them what’s happening, if they’re having a day off because they finished the stage one training or if it’s because of what happened to Edward. Tris suspects that it’s the latter. The entire group of initiates feels overly restless, but can’t find the willpower to get up to actually do anything. After a while, Christina and Al both fall asleep in their beds.

Tris can’t stand to hear Peter, Drew, and Molly playing cards over in the corner like nothing had happened the night before, so she gets up and starts to leave the room. “Where are you going?” Will asked her without getting up from his bed.

“I’m going for a walk,” she explained. “I need to clear my head.” 

Tris walked aimlessly through the corridors, letting her feet take her where ever they wanted to go. She didn’t want to think right now. She lost all track of time.

“Tris,” she heard somebody call her name. She looked over her shoulder and saw Eric jogging towards her from the other side of the hallway that she was in. “I’ve been looking all over for you. You have to come with me right now.”

“Why? What’s happening?”

“I can’t explain it right now, but you must come with me,” he said. He gripped onto her arm and started to lead her away. His grip was tight, but Tris knew that if she wanted to, she could probably break free. She wasn’t afraid, more curious about what he wanted. Eric lead her into an elevator, and they started to go up. Tris had never been onto these floors before, but she thought that the offices and apartments of the Dauntless leaders were up on these floors. 

“Am I in trouble?” she asked.

“No,” Eric said quickly. “And it’s not about Edward. We’ve looked into the matter as much as we possibly could, but can’t find any sort of evidence about who might have done it.”

“Oh,” Tris said blankly. The elevator came to a stop, the doors slid open, and Eric lead Tris out into the well-lit hall. There were some doors set about every three feet on either side of the hall. Eric lead Tris to a room on the corner; a sign by the door said “Meeting Room 7”. Eric turned to Tris before he opened the door.

“I’ll be in my office; it’s just around the corner here. There’s a sign. Come and see me after you’re done.” He waited until Tris nodded with agreement, and then knocked on the door twice.

“Come in,” somebody said. Eric motioned for Tris to enter. She stepped forward, put her hand on the doorknob, turned around to look at Eric, but he turned around and left. Tris opened the door. 

A Dauntless woman that Tris didn’t know sat at the table in the room. She looked expectantly at Tris as she entered the room. “Beatrice,” the woman said, her voice soft and gentle. Tris did a double take. 

“Mom?” Tris asked with some confusion. Despite the large sleeve tattoo that covered most of her mother’s right arm and the black clothes that looked overly strange on her mother, there was no confusing who she was. Natalie held her arms out and Tris ran into her mother’s embrace. “I thought that I’d never be able to see or even speak to you again,” she said as she clung to her mother’s shirt. Even though the fabric was strange and too dark, Natalie still smelt like she always did, which was an odd comfort to Tris.

“Me too, baby,” Natalie agreed as she ran a hand over her daughter’s head over and over. “I don’t have much time, though. People are going to notice that I’m gone. I only came here because I was worried about you. About the attack that happened last night.”

“How do you know about that?” Tris asked, a little taken aback by that. But honestly, if her mother was here, with a bunch of tattoos on her arm and dressed in Dauntless clothing, who knew what else that Natalie was hiding?

“Never mind that,” Natalie said. She cupped her daughter’s face in her hands gently and looked Tris in the eye. “There is so much that I should have told you about before, but that’s no excuse now. You are in so much danger right now, and I can’t even begin to describe how much of a mistake that you’ve gotten yourself into right now.”

“Mom, I don’t-” Tris started. 

“Trust nobody, do you understand me?” Natalie interrupted Tris. 

“Mom?” Tris asked. She was starting to feel exceptionally afraid right now. 

“And I need for you to do something for me, alright?” Natalie went on. Tris swallowed hard and then slowly moved her head up and down once. “I need for you to deliver a message to your brother.”

“To Caleb? But he’s in-”

“Erudite, I know. And he’s in so much more danger than you are right now,” Natalie went on. “He doesn’t even know this, because I can’t get to him like I can with you. I need for you to go to him and to deliver a message. Don’t question it right now. The message is this: Look at the simulation results. Repeat this back to me.”

“Look at the simulation results,” Tris said. “Mom, how am I-”

“I can’t tell you this right now,” Natalie said. She smoothed down Tris’s hair again. “You must tell this to Caleb. It’s very important.”

“Mom, do you know about my-” Tris started to say, but, once again, Natalie cut her off.

“Do not speak that word out loud,” she hissed as she looked over to the door. “It is very dangerous. Right now, you must go to Eric Coulter. He will help you. Trust nobody except for Eric Coulter. Do you understand?” Once more, Tris moved her head up and down once. “Good. He will help you. I have to go.”

Before Tris could get another word in, Natalie was over at the door, and then she was gone. Tris stood there for another moment as she tried to process what had just happened. Her mother was Dauntless. Had been Dauntless. Had she been kicked out during her initiation? Or had she been born into the faction? 

After a moment, Tris remembered that she was supposed to go talk to Eric. She had so many questions, and she wasn’t even entirely certain that he’d be able to help answer them. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, please let me know if you spot any grammatical errors.
> 
> Reviews and kudos are always appreciated.
> 
> Special shout out to EruditePrincess1993 for helping me with canon... It's been much too long since I read the books and I'd forgotten about that. And for at least trying to help me with the grammar.

Tris walked over to the door of the meeting room and looked down the hall, but her mother was long gone. She left the room, went around the corner, and quickly found Eric’s office. 

She knocked and entered when he said, “Come in.” Eric looked up from something that he was writing on. “Is she-?” he started.

“She left,” Tris said blankly. 

“Shut the door,” Eric said. Tris did as she was told, and she sat in the chair when Eric gestured for her to do so. “I’m sure that you must have a lot of questions right now.” Tris could only nod. “But it isn’t safe to talk about it. However, she wouldn’t have risked coming here if she didn’t think that it was important. What did she tell you?”

“She said that you were the only person that I could trust,” Tris said, her voice but a whisper. Her hands were shaking, and she clenched the armrests so that Eric wouldn’t see. 

“And?” Eric prompted after a beat of silence. 

“And she said that I had to take a message to my brother. But he’s in Erudite.”

“Mm, yes,” Eric said as he absently twirled the ring in his eyebrow. 

“How am I supposed to get to Erudite? They probably won’t even let me into their part of the city!” Tris went on, her voice low.

“Come with me,” Eric said. He lead Tris back to the meeting room that she and her mom had just been in. “Wait here,” he said, and then left for a few minutes. He came back into the room with a bag. “I’ll wait outside while you change.”

“Change? Into what?”

“How else do you think that you’re going to be able to get into Erudite?” Eric snapped at her, his voice low. His eyes swept over the tattoo on Tris’s collarbone. “And make sure that you wear something that’ll cover that up.” Eric left the room again. 

Tris pulled several items of blue clothing out from the bag; she had no idea where he might have gotten them from, and didn’t even want to think about why he had them. Or why they were all women’s clothing in her size. Almost mechanically, Tris pulled off her black tank top, black pants, and black boots and put on a knee-length blue dress, a blue cardigan, and blue flats. 

Feeling rather stupid, Tris stepped back out into the hall. Eric leaned against the opposite wall as he waited for her, but he stood up straight when she came out. “You look like you fit the bill, except…” He took out a safety pin from his pocket and used it to pin the top of the cardigan closed. Upon doing so, all of Tris’s tattoo became completely covered. “And turn around.” Tris did as she was told.

With fingers almost too gentle to belong to him, Eric pulled the elastic out from Tris’s long, blonde hair. He gathered it up again and quickly twisted it up until it was in a tight bun, and then he secured it with the hair elastic. “Come on, we don’t have all day.”

They walked out of the Dauntless compound in complete silence, and only stopped once they got to the train platform; it was the flat one, where the train actually stopped to let people on and off. Instead of getting into the car that was painted black for Dauntless, Eric lead Tris into the blue Erudite car instead. It was empty, and Eric lead them to a seat in the back. 

“Are you going to explain what’s going on?” Tris whispered once the train had started moving again.

“Yes, but not now. It’s-”

“Not safe,” Tris finished. “So you keep saying.”

“You’ll understand when we do tell you. I promise,” Eric said. They lapsed into silence. The train stopped at another station, and a man in a crisp, blue suit got onto the car. 

“Mr. Coulter,” the man said. “It is a surprise but a pleasure to see you.”

“Yes,” Eric agreed curtly. “I am on an escort mission.”

“So you are,” the man said as he looked briefly at Tris. He sat down in a seat in the middle of the car just as the train started to move. Tris pressed her lips together and tried to calm herself down. She was certain that the Erudite man would be able to hear her heart; she was sure that Eric could, at least. 

After two other stops, Eric stood, and Tris followed him out onto the platform. It was filled with other Erudite members, who were waiting to get onto the train. Eric put a steady hand on Tris’s elbow, in the way that any escort might in an overly crowded area. Eric lead her away from the train platform, across the street, and into a building that was all steel and glass. Inside, there were rows and rows of people sitting at computers. Hanging on the only wall that wasn’t floor-to-ceiling windows was a giant picture of Jeanine. As Eric and Tris walked up to the marble counter, her eyes seemed to follow them. It was like she knew that they weren’t supposed to be there, and it crept Tris out.

The woman working behind there looked up at them from her computer. “How can I help you?” she asked. She looked briefly at Tris, but focused her attention on Eric.

“Um… I need to see Caleb Prior,” Tris said. She gave herself a mental pat on the back that her voice didn’t shake and that she didn’t stammer at all. 

“One moment,” the woman said. She typed something on her computer— presumably looking up where Caleb was at the moment. “He’s in the third library right now,” she said. “Should I-”

“We know where it is,” Eric said coolly. He put his hand on Tris’s elbow again and lead her past the woman at the counter, past all of the people working on the computers. Nobody seemed to pay much attention to them. Once they were in the elevator, Eric looked down at Tris from the corner of his eye. “Make this as quick as possible. The longer we stay here, the more attention we attract.” Tris’s head barely moved as she nodded in agreement. 

The elevator opened up into the largest library that Tris had ever seen in her life. There was nothing but floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, each one completely stuffed with books. They stepped up to the counter, and again, Tris asked for Caleb. The woman pointed them towards the back corner. 

They found Caleb, half-buried behind a bunch of thick books at a table. He was typing something very quickly onto a laptop with one hand while his other hand pointed to something in a book. As Tris and Eric approached, Caleb looked up, and then did a double take. “Beatrice,” he said coolly as he stood up. He looked as if a thousand questions ran through his mind. After a beat, he said, “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“No,” Tris agreed. “I have a message for you: Look at the simulation results.” Caleb gave her a confused look. 

“What?” he said.

“I’m sorry, but that’s all that I know,” Tris said. “We have to go.” Eric lead Tris out a back door of the library, which was an emergency staircase in case of a fire. Tris felt Caleb’s gaze on her until the door had closed behind them.

“Quick, change,” Eric said as he handed Tris the bag that he’d carried all the way from the meeting room back at the Dauntless compound. Tris looked in it and saw that the only clothes were what she had been wearing before. Eric turned his back on Tris to allow her a little bit of privacy while she changed in the stairwell. 

She quickly pulled off her clothes, a little embarrassed that she didn’t have much privacy other than Eric’s chivalry at the moment. After she’d slipped her tank top on, she reached up and pulled her hair out from the bun until it was just in a ponytail. “Okay,” Tris said once she’d zipped up her boots. Eric turned back around to face her, and then he reached up and pulled the elastic out from her hair completely. He did not have her turn back around, but rather, adjusted her hair so that it covered her face. Tris felt her face flush, and hoped that either it didn’t show too much, or that Eric wouldn’t notice. 

“Keep your eyes on the ground and don’t look at anybody,” Eric said as he motioned her towards the stairs that would take them down. “We’re going to go back as quickly as we can.” They half-ran down the stairs until there weren’t any more floors to go down. Eric pushed open a door that lead to an alley. Eric lead Tris through the winding paths behind the buildings; it might have been the same paths that she’d run down when they’d been playing paintball. It had only been two nights ago, but it seemed like so much had happened since that night. 

The alley eventually ended, but Eric made them pause before they left the relative safety between the buildings. He looked around the street, and then motioned for Tris to follow after him. They ran towards a section of the tracks that was on the ground, and didn’t have to wait long for a train to come by. They quickly jumped up into the Dauntless car, and Tris allowed herself a moment to catch her breath. 

“Can I have my hair tie back now?” she asked quietly. Eric dug it out from his pocket and handed it to her. Tris pulled her hair back up into her usual ponytail. “When are you going to-”

“Soon,” Eric interrupted her. Tris nodded with agreement. “I trust that I don’t have to tell you not to tell anybody about this?” Tris nodded again. 

 

* * *

Tris had thought that she’d had a difficult time getting to sleep after Edward had been stabbed, but that was nothing in comparison to that night. She was certain that she hadn’t gotten a single wink of sleep all night. In fact, it was a bit of a relief when Eric burst into the room and fired off the starting pistol. 

“Come on, physical training is over, right?” Peter complained as they all hustled out of bed.

“Yes, but that’s no excuse not to be fit,” Eric said. “TWO laps around the compound within the hour, or no breakfast!” Since Tris was now able to run a lap around the compound in a little less than half an hour, it wasn’t surprising that Eric wanted for everybody to run two laps. 

Despite Tris’s complete lack of sleep, she thought that she did fairly well at the task. Eric silently ticked off her name on his tablet as she walked past him to grab some quick breakfast before they would start on step two. Whatever it might be. 

After breakfast, Eric and Four lead Dauntless-born and transfers alike to a dark hallway. “You will sit here, quietly, until one of us calls your name,” Eric explained. “When you hear your name, proceed into the room.” He left no room for questions and the two of them marched into separate rooms with the first two people.

Minutes passed, and Tris felt every single one of them. Uriah sat across from Tris, with Marlene on his left and Lynn on his right. 

“So,” Lynn started after a while. “Which one of you ranked first?” 

“Me,” Peter said almost at once. Tris bit back a rude response; she didn’t want to get into a fight with Peter. Not right now. 

“I bet that I could take you,” Lynn said casually. “I’m second, but I could beat any of you transfers.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Peter said with a cruel laugh. “Who was first?”

“Uriah,” Lynn said and jerked her thumb at him. “As I’m sure that you’re already aware, we’ve spent our entire lives preparing for this.”

Before Peter can respond, Four opened the door. “Lynn,” he said. She stood up and walked into the room with him. 

“Don’t you think that it’s unfair that you guys spent your entire lives getting ready for this, and we’re expected to learn it in a few weeks?” Will asked them once Four had shut the door to the room that he was in. 

“No,” Uriah said quickly. “Stage one might be about skill, sure, but stage two is much different. …Or so I’m told.”

They lapse into silence again. The minutes continue to stretch on. “Tris,” Eric said as he poked his head out the door. She got to her feet and walked into the room. 

The room was set up almost identically to how the classroom at the school had been set up, except that the room was smaller, and there weren’t any desks pushed to the side. 

“Sit,” Eric commanded her. 

“What’s the simulation?” Tris asked as she took a seat. 

“It takes the phrase ‘face your fears’ to reality. The simulation will teach you how to control your emotions in the middle of a frighting situation,” he explained. He picked up a giant syringe and brushed her hair away from the side of her neck. “It works exactly like in the aptitude test that you took, except that the simulation will only end as soon as you’re able to lower your heart rate and control your breathing.”

“Okay,” Tris agrees. Eric injects the serum into the side of Tris’s neck, and she starts to feel a little woozy; she’s glad that she’s already sitting down. 

“The first time is always the hardest,” was the last thing that Tris was aware that Eric said. 

 

* * *

Tris stood in a field of dry grass that went up to her waist. As she spins around in spot, the only thing that she can see is grass. Nothing but grass. The air smells slightly smoky, and the sky is bile-colored; both of these things filled Tris with anxiety. 

A large shadow swoops overhead. Tris ducks. “It’s not real,” she whispers to herself as another shadow swoops over her. “None of this is real.” 

Sharp talons dug into the skin on her shoulder and Tris bit back a cry. With a half-stifled sob, Tris turned her head to see what it was. A raven, nearly as big as her head. It’s large, beady eye focused on Tris, and it opened its beak and let out a loud caw. 

With another loud flap, a second raven settled onto Tris’s other shoulder. She turned her head to look at it, but as soon as she removed her attention from the first raven, it started to peck at her. 

“Leave me alone!” Tris yelled as loud as she could. She flapped her arms, and then started to run when arm movement alone wasn’t enough. 

The next thing Tris knows, she’s completely surrounded by ravens. Every which way that she looks, she sees nothing but the iridescent, black feathers, sharp beaks and talons, and beady eyes that seem to judge her. 

As one, the ravens descend upon Tris in a single mass, their talons stretched out and ready to attack. Tris tried to run away from them, but her feet were rooted to the ground. Instead, as the birds fell upon her, she collapsed onto the ground with her arms over her head for protection. The talons and beaks cut into her skin and she thought that they might be trying to skin her alive.

“This isn’t real, none of this is real,” Tris whispered under her breath. “This isn’t real, none of this is real.” She continued to chant this over and over until she opened her eyes and found herself staring at Eric. 

“Tris,” he said gently, and reached out to touch her shoulder. 

“Don’t touch me,” she snapped out as she jerked away from his hand. 

“It’s okay, it’s over,” Eric insisted. 

“S-shit,” Tris stammered out as she ran a hand through her hair. Her hand was badly shaking, but she didn’t care much at the moment. 

“Come on, I’ll walk you back to the dorm,” Eric said gently as he put a steady hand on her elbow. 

“I can’t let the other see me like this,” Tris said as she buried her face in her hands. 

“Don’t think that you’re the only one to freak out like this, but come on,” Eric said as he gently pulled her to her feet. He lead Tris out the other door— she realized just then that all of the others must have gone out the back, because once they went into the rooms, they didn’t come back out again. Instead of leading Tris down the hall to where the dorm was, Eric lead her up some stairs, and then called the elevator. 

“Where are we going?” Tris asked with some confusion. 

“Don’t tell anybody,” Eric said simply as the doors slid open and they got in. It was a slightly different elevator than the one that they’d used when he’d taken her to see her mother. When the elevator stopped and the doors slid open, they were in a residential area. It was a part of the compound that Tris had not been to before, mostly because the leaders wanted to keep the initiates in a specific area. Eric lead her about halfway down the hall and then used a key to unlock a door that read “2C”. It was a tidy but small apartment living room that opened up into a kitchen and dining room area. 

“What is this?” Tris asked as she looked around. 

“My apartment,” Eric explained. “Probably one of the few places where I know that nobody at all is listening in on or watching us. I have to go do one last test, but I’ll be back as soon as it’s over, okay? Please don’t mess with anything.” And then he was gone. 

Tris still felt a little shaky, so she went to sit on the sofa. It was overly worn, especially on the cushion against the right-hand armrest, like Eric sat there a lot. In some ways, Tris could very easily picture Eric sitting down after a hard day of dealing with stupid initiates and whatever else he had to do whenever he wasn’t being an instructor. He’d probably pick up a thick book, since he didn’t appear to have a TV. 

Tris shook the thought away. It was weird enough being alone in his personal space, and thinking about what Eric might do in his free time was stranger still. 

Instead, she tried to think about why Eric would have brought here up here, and his parting words. “One of the few places where I know that nobody at all is listening in on or watching us.” What did that even mean? Had people been watching her ever since she got to Dauntless?

Almost against her will, Tris remembered her last morning at her home in Abnegation, when she thought that she’d seen a faint light in the corner of the bathroom mirror. When Tris had seen it, her first thought that it was a recording light from a hidden camera. But then she’d dismissed it— it had simply been a trick of the low light in the room. 

But now, as Tris mulled over Eric’s words, she started to think that maybe, it hadn’t been just a trick of the light. 

Suddenly feeling on edge with the realization that her life was being watched by strangers, Tris stood and started to pace in front of the sofa. She tried to relax, because Eric had said that it was safe in his apartment. He probably knew that they were recording everybody, and had done sweeps of his apartment to make sure that he found all of the audio and video recording devices so that he might have a moment of absolute privacy. 

She sat down again with the knowledge that, even if she did now know about the cameras, there wasn’t much that she could do unless she wanted to spend the rest of her life in Eric’s apartment. She hugged herself and glanced nervously over her shoulder. There wasn’t anything behind her but a small dining room table and two chairs. Not even a piece of art hung on the wall.

Tris let out an annoyed huff and lay down on the sofa. She closed her eyes. Maybe if she fell asleep, she’d wake up in her bed the day before Edward got stabbed. Maybe she’d wake up before she even picked Dauntless. Would she make the same decision all over again? 

Yes, she decided almost absently. She would.

 

* * *

Tris hadn’t even been aware that she’d fallen asleep until she was awoken by the sound of Eric unlocking the door to his apartment. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said as he stepped inside and locked the door from the inside. 

“No, it’s okay,” Tris said as she sat up and raked a hand through her hair. “I just didn’t get much sleep last night. That’s all.”

“I know that you must have a lot of questions, but the first thing: How long do you think that you were in the simulation?”

“I don’t know,” Tris said with a slight shake of her head. In all honestly, every minute that she’d been being attacked by the birds had felt like a lifetime to her. “Half an hour, maybe?”

“Three minutes,” Eric said. “That’s three times faster than anybody else did today.”

“What?” Tris said blankly. 

“I watched as you told yourself that none of it was real, chanting it over and over until you were no longer in the simulation. You were aware, where you?” Eric pressed. Tris nodded in agreement, not quite understanding where this was going. “It’s a sign of divergence.”

“I’m not a-” Tris started, but Eric cut her off. 

“You are not a monster, Tris,” he said as he strode over to her. His voice was low and it sent a shiver down her spine. “And there isn’t a doubt in my mind that you have no desire to dismantle the faction system. Those things are nothing but cruel rumors that have spun wildly out of control. And it’s all the fault of people like Jeanine Matthews.”

“The leader of Erudite?” Tris asked with confusion. “I don’t understand; what does she have to do with any of this?”

“It’s not so much her as it is her predecessor, a man by the name of Michael Norton.”

“I… I don’t remember him,” Tris said with a slight shake of her head. 

“You probably wouldn’t have; he died maybe 15 years ago, and that’s when Jeanine took over as the leader,” Eric explained. “He spent his entire life working to improve the simulation serum, both the one used for the aptitude tests, as well as the modified serum that we use in Dauntless. But there was one thing that always tripped him up.”

“Divergents?” Tris guessed.

“That’s right,” Eric said. 

“Because they tend to get two or more factions on their aptitude tests, Michael thought that they were going to try and tear our entire community apart. And the tiny fact that they can see right through the simulation that we use to train the imitates here…” He gave an absent shrug. “The previous Dauntless leaders went along with this, because they used the serum to test a person’s ability to face and overcome their fears. And if there were people who could manipulate the simulations, then the leaders thought that they had an unfair advantage over people who weren’t. They began to closely watch the simulation results, to watch for those who manipulated them or who, like you, were able to remain aware enough to bring themselves out from the simulation.”

“So they started to kill them?”

“Yes,” Eric said as he gave Tris a piercing look. “Who told you that?”

“Tori Wu.”

“The tattoo artist?” Eric asked, and Tris nodded with agreement. “She isn’t a divergent, though.”

“No, but she said that her brother was one, and that the Dauntless government killed him,” Tris said. “After she gave me my aptitude test, she told me that I shouldn’t pick anything but Abnegation, or else I might end up like her brother.”

“What happened during the simulation for your aptitude test? Tori hand-recorded you result as Abnegation, and claimed that the computer broke while you were under,” Eric said. Tris told him, and he nodded with agreement. “This explains why Natalie came to see us yesterday.”

“But what does my mom have to do with any of this?”

“Your mom has everything to do with this,” Eric replied quickly. “She’s the one who started the Allegiant movement to stop people from killing the divergents.”

“My mom?” Tris asked with some surprise. Sure, she knew that her mother was a very kind and gentle person. Natalie just wanted to help rehabilitate people who’d lost their jobs because of one reason or another. She spent hours helping people who’d lost everything that they owned due to fire, or women who’d left their families behind because their husband was beating them. So in a way, Tris supposed to she could see her mother working to help stop people being killed because of some stupid reason. 

It was the part where Natalie had tattoos and wore Dauntless clothing in order to sneak into the Dauntless compound that was tripping Tris up. 

“I don’t know her reasons for wanting to do it,” Eric went on after a moment of silence. “She found out that I was divergent and that Jeanine was holding several death threats— mine as well as several of my friends— over my head.”

“Why was Jeanine threatening you, though?” Tris asked.

“Because I was her little spy,” Eric explained. “I still am, but she doesn’t know that all of the information that I feed her is a giant lie.”

“How did the leader of Erudite get a hold of you like that?” Tris asked.

“I was born into the faction,” Eric explained simply. “I didn’t have somebody nice enough to destroy a computer for me, so I was reported to Jeanine. She wanted to plant me in Dauntless so that I could look for more divergents. I… I’ve done things that I’m not overly proud of in order to get to the top so quickly. But it was Natalie who helped me get to this spot, no matter what Jeanine might think. I only knew that I just had to help save other divergents from ending up like George Wu.” Eric stood and looked down at Tris. “You should probably get back before the others realize that you’re missing.”

“Wait, one more thing,” Tris said. “About what you said earlier, about how you knew that nobody would be watching or listening to us in your apartment?”

“We’re being watched. All over the city. Some of the cameras are controlled and monitored by the Dauntless as part of a security program, but the other cameras and microphones…” Eric trailed off, and a shiver of fear ran down Tris’s spine. 

“Would the Dauntless have put one in the mirror in my old house in Abnegation?”

“No,” Eric said simply. “There are other people out there… beyond the city. They have way more cameras and microphones than the Dauntless ever have. I haven’t seen them myself, but the first weekend that I spent in this apartment, it was cleaning out all of the hidden recording devices. Dauntless only wants to make sure that people don’t break laws. The Watchers— that’s what the Allegiant call them— track our every single move.”

“Why?”

“Natalie told me that she knows why, but she never elaborated.”

“I have so many other questions, though,” Tris whispered as she got up and followed Eric over to the door.

“I know that you do, but it’s important that we pretend like we know nothing. Both for the sake of those who want the divergents dead, as well as for the Watchers,” Eric said. “Will you be able to get back to the dorm okay on your own?” Tris nodded with agreement. “Good. I will contact you if there is anything else that you need to know in regards to this.”

Tris was barely out of Eric’s apartment when he shut the door behind her. She hurried down the hall, being sure to keep her head down. As she rode the elevator down to the first floor, she wondered if the Watchers were watching her right now. Were they suspicious about Eric, and curious about what they could have been doing in his apartment? The apartment that he’d so painstakingly cleaned all of the recording devices out from? Had they somehow managed to get back into his apartment while he’d been gone and planted more in the meantime, or did he make sure that nobody was able to get into his place?

Eric might have answered some of the questions that Tris had, but, in the process, he’d only just raised more. 


	6. Chapter 6

“Hey hey, listen up!” Peter said as he strode into the dorms later that afternoon. “There’s a new report from Erudite out today!” He held a newspaper, and Tris saw a flash of a picture on the front of it. 

“’The mass exodus of the children of Abnegation leaders cannot be ignored or attributed to coincidence’,” he started to read. 

Tris’s stomach started to twist. It was no secret that Abnegation and Erudite hated each other, and, after talking with Eric earlier, Tris was now starting to understand why. A lot of people who were divergents probably ended up in Abnegation, where they would be relatively safe. In an effort to flush them out, Erudite decided to publish verbal attacks on the faction. Tris wasn’t quite sure how it was supposed to get the divergents out, or if they just wanted to humiliate some of the members. But she had yet to read one article from Erudite’s so-called reports that was actually true. 

“’The recent transfers of Beatrice and Caleb Prior, the children of Andrew Prior, calls into question the soundness of Abnegation value’s and teachings’,” Peter went on.

Tris’s hands curled into fists. It was bad enough that Erudite attacked the Abnegation faction, but this was an exceptionally low blow to call out her father so publicly. 

“’Why else would the children of such an important man decide that the lifestyle he has set out for them is not an admirable one?’” Peter went on. “’Molly Atwood, a fellow Dauntless transfer, suggested that a disturbed and abusive upbringing might be to blame. “I heard her talking in her sleep once,” Molly told our reporter. “She was telling her father to stop doing something. I don’t know what it was, but it gave her nightmares.”’”

Tris had heard enough. She stormed over to Peter and tried to snatch the paper from his hands, but he held it up above Tris’s head. She lifted her heel and stomped on Peter’s foot as hard as she could before she turned around and threw herself at Molly. 

Before Tris could do any damage to the other girl, Will pulled her away. “That’s my father!” Tris screamed at Molly. “You are nothing but a disgusting piece of trash!”

Will lifted Tris off from the ground and literally carried her from the room. 

“What?” Tris snarled at Will as soon as he set her down outside of the dorm. “Did you think that I couldn’t defend myself against that piece of Candor trash?” 

“No,” Will said evenly. “I figured that I’d stop you from starting a fight in the dorm. Calm down.”

Tris let out a frustrated roar and punched the door frame hard until it cracked under the pressure of her blows. She doubled over, rested her elbows on her knees, and started to half-sob, half-cry. Her knuckles were bleeding. 

 

* * *

Tris let out a soft laugh as she watched Al, carrying Christina on his back, barrel through the crowd in the pit. People moved out of their way as fast as they could.

It was a wonder what a little bit of retail therapy could do. After Tris had gotten her hand bandaged by the nurse, Christina had talked her into going into town again. Tris had wanted to try and talk to Tori about the divergent thing again, but it had been the older woman’s night off. 

Instead, Tris had talked to one of the other tattoo artists for a long time about a design that she wanted to get on her shoulder, and then she’d sat in the chair for about an hour. The tattoo wasn’t finished, and would take several more trips to the parlor, but Tris could deal with that. 

After the tattoo shop, Christina had dragged Tris to the clothing shop, and then had persuaded the other girl to put on some make-up. 

As the four of them walked into the Pit, Tris looked over towards the Chasm and saw Eric leaning casually against the railing. There was a bottle of something in his hand, and he was laughing and smiling with some older Dauntless members. 

“Uh-oh, instructor alert,” Will said under his breath. Almost as if just thinking about him caught his attention, Eric turned his head away from his friends and looked over to their group.

“Tris,” Eric called out as he pushed himself off from the rail and walked over to them. He wore a frown, which only increased when he got closer. “What happened to you?” he asked as he motioned with the bottle in his hand towards her bandaged knuckles.

“I got into a fight with a door frame,” Tris said blankly. Eric raised an eyebrow at that, and Tris offered him a cocky grin. “But hey, you should see the door frame!” 

Eric let out a short, bark-like laugh. The sound made Will, Christina, and Al do double-takes; they were startled by the fact that their instructor was even capable of laughing. 

“And your shoulder? Did the door frame hit you back?” Eric asked as he motioned next to Tris’s shoulder, which was still bandaged from her trip to the tattoo parlor. Al’s, Christina’s, and Will’s jaws were practically on the floor. First, he laughed, and then he made a joke?

“Oh, no,” Tris said with a little laugh. “I went to get another tattoo.”

“Of what? Can I see?” Eric asked. 

“Er, it’s not finished yet,” Tris said quietly. “But yeah, go ahead.” She turned around and Eric carefully lifted up the edge of the bandage that covered most of her shoulder so that he could peek under it. 

“It looks good, as incomplete as it might be,” Eric said as he carefully put the bandage back down and smoothed the tape out. “I’d be interested to see it when it’s finished.”

“The guy at the shop said to come back in a day or two, after this has healed a little,” Tris said, and Eric nodded with agreement. 

“Do me a favor and stay away from the Chasm, okay?”

“Of course,” Tris said, and flashed him a small but sincere smile. Will cleared his throat behind Tris, and Eric turned to go rejoin his friends. 

Al rushed at Tris and threw her over his shoulder. She let out a startled yelp and felt her face grow hot. “Come on, I’m taking you to dinner!” he said. 

As Tris was carried away, she looked back to find that Eric and his friends were watching them. She offered them a little wave, and Eric lifted his bottle in a sort of mock-salute. 

“What was all that about?” Al asked. It was obvious to Tris that he was trying to keep the emotion out from his voice, but failed at it. 

“I think that we’d all like to know the answer to that question,” Christina said in a singsong voice. 

 

* * *

Tris opened her eyes. She stood in the Pit. The other initiates stood a few feet away from her, but none of them looked in her direction when she called out to them. 

Tris tried to move forward, but ran into a sheet of near-invisible glass. After a moment of banging on the glass, Tris realized that it wasn’t going to break. Instead, she looked up and found that she was in some sort of box. She reached up to try and push the lid off, but it was too tight. She was trapped. 

A second later, Tris realized that water was coming up from the bottom of the box. It quickly covered her feet and made her socks soggy. 

“HEY!” Tris yelled out as loud as she could as she pounded her fists on the glass. “Let me out of here!” The water was to her knees already. Still nobody turned their attention to Tris. 

She started to beat her fists harder against the glass, but when the water reached her hips, Tris started to throw her shoulder against it instead. “HELP! Please help!”

As Tris’s body rose, weightless, in the water, she caught a glimpse of Eric standing in the entrance of a hall. “None of this is real,” Tris whispered to herself before she was completely submerged in the water. 

She reached her hand out through the water and tapped on the glass. A giant, spider-webbed crack appeared where her finger had hit. She tapped at it again and the glass shattered outward. Water sprayed out from the box, and the force of it carried Tris out as well. 

Tris gasped for breath and found herself back in the simulation room. She smelt smoke, the smell of plastic burning. Eric stood over her, his face impossibly close. He looked beyond angry. 

“Dammit Tris, what did I tell you yesterday?” he hissed, his voice barely audible. 

“What happened?” Tris stammered out, afraid of the look in Eric’s eyes and the fury in his voice. “What is that smell?” She half-turned her head and noticed that the monitor that allowed Eric to view the simulation that Tris was in was quite literally on fire. “Oh my god!”

“It broke,” Eric said, his voice a bit louder. He didn’t move away from her. He leaned in close to her ear. His breath was hot against her skin, and Tris wanted to move away from him, but forced herself to remain still. “Meet me in the training room after dinner. This is clearly something that we’re going to have to work on.”

The fire sprinklers kicked on just then, and the two of them were instantly doused with ice-cold water. 

“Get out,” Eric said as he yanked Tris up by her arm roughly. He opened up the door that she’d come in and shoved her out into the hall. The initiates who had yet to be called in for their own simulation looked up, startled, at the two of them. They must have made quite a site, both completely dripping wet. 

At least the freezing water was a good excuse for Tris to be shaking. 

“What’s happening?” Four yelled as he rushed out from the other room. His eyes raked over Eric and Tris, and he pressed his lips together in an effort to not burst out laughing. 

“The computer overheated and caught on fire,” Eric said simply. “I’m going to go change, but the other computer is out of commission until we can get it fixed anyway.” He stomped off down the hall. Even dripping wet, he still managed to look completely intimidating. 

Tris hung her head and ran off in the opposite direction. It was the wrong way to go, but Eric seemed angry, and she didn’t want to run into him right now. It was bad enough that he was probably going to chew her out after dinner. 

 

* * *

Eric was waiting for Tris when she went into the training room after dinner. Instead of standing by the board on the wall, before one of the punching bags, or even on the mat, he was sitting casually on the floor against the wall. He had a long, flat box in his hands, and he was absently running his thumb over a corner over and over. He looked up when Tris came in.

“Come here,” he said, and motioned to the ground next to him. Tris came over and sat down next to him. He opened up the box; inside of it were two syringes that were filled with the same liquid that they used to send people into the simulations. “We are able to program the chips in the serum to show up on any sort of device, but we’re also able to make it so that another person can experience the simulation at the same time.”

“Who’s-” Tris started.

“Mine,” Eric said simply. He brushed the hair off from Tris’s neck and injected her. Then, he injected himself. She watched as he carefully put the syringes back into the box as they both waited for the serum to kick in. 

A moment later, they were standing in the training room. It was exactly the same as it had been before, except that the electronic board was completely off, a black screen. “I might have forgotten to mention this to you— I cannot recall— but another, major indicator of divergence is being able to manipulate the simulations. As I saw you break the glass with just a simple tap of your finger, I realized my mistake,” Eric explained. 

“Are we in a simulation right now?” Tris asked. Everything looked so real, but then again, the others that she’d been in had been exceptionally realistic. She’d actually felt the claws of the ravens digging into her flesh and it had felt like she’d been about to drown. 

“Yes,” Eric said. With a wave of his hand, the ceiling flew off and the walls fell over. They stood in the middle of the city at sunset, except that there wasn’t anybody else around. “I set fire to the computer so that your simulation wouldn’t be recorded. It’s important that you learn how to control the simulations without others being aware of what you’re doing.” He grabbed her arm and spun her around so that she had to look at him. “And what you did earlier? Too obvious.”

“Okay, so how do I control a simulation?” Tris asked. 

“What were you thinking when you broke the glass in that tank?” Eric asked.

“I was thinking ‘shit, I don’t want to drown’,” Tris said. Eric laughed a little. 

“No, I’m being serious. You must have thought about how you wanted to break open the glass,” Eric said. 

“I don’t know,” Tris said with an absent shrug. “I guess.” 

Eric raked a hand through his hair and let out an annoyed huff. “Okay, so let’s put it like this: have you ever had a dream where you told yourself that you wanted something to happen, and then it did?” Eric asked.

“No, not really,” Tris said with a slight shake of her head. Eric gave her an annoyed look. “I don’t know what you want me to say!”

“Okay,” Eric said slowly. He held his arms out to gesture to everything around them. “This is a playroom. You are perfectly safe in here. Do something to the environment around us.”

“I think that it really only worked in the other simulation because I was so afraid,” Tris said, her voice quiet. 

“Okay,” Eric said slowly. He then glared at Tris. “If you tell anybody about this, I will make you regret it.” 

“I won’t,” Tris said with some confusion. A second later, the city was gone, and the two of them stood in a small box that was lit from above. She looked around with apprehension and wondered if water would come and fill this room, too. 

A second later, Eric sort of jumped back a little. Tris looked down at the ground and saw dozens of the largest spiders that she’d ever seen in her entire life walking towards the two of them. The body of each spider was about the size of her fist, and their long, furry legs were probably longer than her fingers. 

Tris wouldn’t be overly surprised if these things showed up in her simulation tomorrow— they were actually quite horrifying. 

“How do you get rid of spiders?” Tris asked with rising panic in her voice as more and more spiders appeared. 

“Any way that you’d like, just do it quickly,” Eric said with equal panic. There were so many of them that stomping on them would probably prove to be rather ineffective. As the spiders grew closer to them, they were forced backwards against the wall. 

“We can’t get physically hurt in here, right?” Tris asked.

“No,” Eric said. His voice was a bit higher than it normally was. 

Tris thought about fire, burning hot, consuming the spiders until they were nothing but ash. A white-hot flame burst forth from the tips of her fingers. She looked at it with some surprise, as if startled that it had actually happened. Then, she shot it at the spiders until they all caught on fire. 

But then, the room was on fire, so Tris made it rain, even though they were inside. Water cascaded from the ceiling, rough at first, and then it turned into a light drizzle after the fire had been put out. 

They both awoke from the simulation with gasping breaths. 

 

* * *

“Thanks,” Tris whispered as Eric handed her a mug of hot cocoa. After they’d awoken from the simulation, Eric had taken Tris straight up to his apartment. He sat down next to her on the other side of the sofa and blew across the top of his own mug of cocoa. Tris cautiously took a sip, but found it to be much too hot, so she set it down on the coffee table before she turned to look at Eric. “Spiders, huh?”

“Shut up,” Eric said, but there wasn’t any bite to his words. He set his mug down, too, and turned to regard Tris. “I think that you seemed to have gotten the hang of how to control the simulations, but it’ll take some more practice before you can quite grasp the concept of doing so subtly. The final test involves you facing your fears— and I don’t mean the metaphor of your fears— and all of the Dauntless leaders will watch. Even though there is a little bit of control during the fear landscape, non-divergent people don’t have that kind of control.”

“Right, and the breaking glass and fire-shooting will be dead give-aways,” Tris said dryly. 

“Yes, but please don’t do that again in your own simulations. Those computers are expensive to repair and people will start to get suspicious if I keep ending up with a computer that only ever catches on fire or becomes broken whenever you use it,” Eric said with frustration. 

“No, I understand,” Tris said quickly. She picked up her mug and found that the cocoa had gotten to a much more comfortable drinking temperature. “We never had things like this in Abnegation.”

“Always just seemed rather silly to me,” Eric said as he picked up his own mug. “What exactly is selfish about eating something that tastes good? It’s not like you ate all of the things that tasted good and left the bad things for the homeless people or anything.”

“No,” Tris said slowly. “We just didn’t exactly like things that are overly indulgent. There are people who can’t have nice things, and it would be selfish of us to enjoy them.”

“I suppose that it makes a bit more sense when you put it like that, but honestly, where do they draw the limit? Some people don’t have homes, so technically, it’s selfish of you guys to live in houses.”

“It’s dumb, I know,” Tris said as she shook her head. “There was a reason why I wanted to leave, despite the warning that Tori gave me.”

“I think that facing social ostracization and never being able to properly see your family ever again is one of the bravest things people can do,” Eric said. “And I don’t think that people give those who transfer enough credit.”

“Hey, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“How do you guys know about the… what do you call them again? The Watchers?”

“I don’t know,” Eric said slowly. “Right after I was made into a full-fledge Dauntless member, Natalie came to visit me. She told me that there are people outside the city who watch and listen in on every single thing that we do. She showed me a bunch of hidden cameras, and told me to leave nothing unturned because they can be hidden just about anywhere.”

“Okay, so you spent your first weekend turning everything over in the apartment, but how do you know that these people don’t come in here and plant more things while you’re gone?” Tris asked. 

“I’ll show you something,” Eric said. He set his mug down and went over into the little kitchen area. He pulled a pot out from inside the cupboard, pulled the lid off from it, and pulled something out from inside the pot. He brought it over to Tris; it looked like a bunch of computer chips all glued together, but there were some blinking lights on it. “It’s something that I made. Turns out my background in Erudite isn’t completely useless in Dauntless after all. It shorts out anything that runs on electricity within a small radius. The Allegiant have been working on them for a long time, but with some training here with the computers in Dauntless, I was finally able to crack the code. I can’t keep much of anything in the apartment because of it, but it’s worth it.”

“But if this turns off all of the electronic devices, why are your lights on anyway?”

“I have a generator,” Eric explained. “Solar powered. I invented this, but, we all quickly realized that there was a massive draw-back to not being able to have electricity. So somebody else invented a generator for us to use.”

“How does my mom know about the Watchers?” Tris asked as she handed Eric back the device. 

“I don’t know,” Eric said simply as he went to put it away. “She just came to me. It was like she knew that I was in trouble, and she offered me a way out. Of course, I can’t exactly just turn my back on Jeanine because then she’ll out me to the entire city, but I no longer feel like I’m hopelessly trapped.”

“The morning of the aptitude test and the choosing ceremony, I was standing before the bathroom mirror, fixing my hair, and I thought that I saw a red light in the corner of the mirror. I thought that it was a trick of the light, but now I’m not so sure,” Tris said. “Why wouldn’t my mom have used one of those things or gone through the house to search for cameras?”

“We’re only able to produce those devices as well as the generators fast enough. If we take too much from the labs in Erudite, Jeanine starts to get suspicious,” Eric explained. “It should come as no surprise to you that the divergent in Abnegation decided to let the others have the generators before they got them.”

Tris nodded with agreement, and looked over to Eric. “I have so many questions.”

“I’ll answer them if I can.”

“They’re for my mom,” Tris explained. She lowered her gaze and looked down at the floor before she set her mug down on the coffee table and stood. “I should go now. My friends are probably wondering where I am.”

“Okay,” Eric agreed as he walked her over to the door. “Remember: tomorrow’s simulation is a test, not a time for you to mess around with what you can do inside of them.”

“Right,” Tris said. “Thank you. For everything. I probably would have exposed myself and been killed if you hadn’t been helping me.”

 

* * *

Tris wasn’t even aware of where she was going until she looked up at a gaping hole in the ceiling. The building that she jumped off of right after the choosing ceremony. 

It has been a few days since Tris first went into a simulation with Eric. She continued to try and figure out how to fool the Dauntless leaders as well as the Erudite who looked at the simulation footage to study. But in the evenings, she and Eric went into a simulation of his design and Tris was free to do whatever she liked. 

The longer Tris remained in Dauntless, the more she started to question everything. The first thing on her mind was Erudite. They’d released a couple more of their so-called reports, each one crueler than the last. The most recent one accused Abnegation of hoarding luxuries like cars and fresh fruit instead of distributing them to the rest of the city.

It was an absurd notion to Tris. Literally everybody knew that Abnegation did not drive cars, and the only people who did were Erudite in their solar cars and the occasional Dauntless member who patrolled the city. 

Yes, Abnegation took care of the fields and the animals that went to provide food for the entire city, but people in Erudite oversaw everything. They made sure that the animals were healthy and that the crops would yield the most amount of food. 

So when Erudite accused Abnegation of hoarding food, it was almost as if they were admitting that they failed at their job of overseeing Abnegation in regards to farming. 

Next, her thought turned to her divergence, the Watchers, and the Allegiant. Eric tried to answer her questions, but there were still a lot of gaps in her knowledge about what was going on. 

She wanted to talk to her mom, because somewhere in the back of her mind, Tris thought that speaking to her would somehow solve every single problem in the entire universe. Well, maybe not all of them, just most of them. As Tris mulled this over in her mind, she remembered that she still had the grey dress that she’d come to Dauntless in. It would be very easy for her to put the dress back on. And since the Abnegation were all very modest dressers, she wouldn’t have to worry about covering up her tattoos. She would put the dress back on, walk to the station, get in the Abnegation car, ride the train into the Abnegation part of town and…

And then what? Would she just waltz back into her childhood home with a “Hi, mom, hi dad! I’m here for some answers!”? She knew that it was foolish almost as soon as she thought it. Her mom had probably put a lot on the line just to come and see her, and Tris understood that she and Eric had done the same in order to deliver the message to Caleb.

Her thoughts turned towards her brother and the message. What did it mean? If her mom was divergent like Tris was, then Eric said that there was a good chance that Caleb was, too. Divergences tended to run in families; it was genetic. But maybe Caleb didn’t know, since Natalie wasn’t able to get to him like she could Tris. 

And what had he discovered by looking into the simulation results?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I picked spiders for Eric's fear because of an interview with Jai Courtney. He said that he was afraid of spiders. I'm sure that there are some other things, too, but that's what he said in answer to the interviewer's question.
> 
> Besides, it seems like a pretty good fear to have... right?
> 
> Anyway, as always, please let me know if you spotted any hinky grammar stuff. Reviews and kudos are always appreciated.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is an attempted sexual assault in this chapter. It's a lot rougher than in the book, because I sort of felt like it had been rather half-assed. I'm telling you guys this in advance in case you want to skip over it. The scene starts like it did in the books, so you'll know that it's coming.

Tris walked back to the dormitory after dinner alone. She expected to find a few people there, lounging around on the beds in an attempt to entertain themselves. Instead, she found everybody clustered around the electronic board that had been used to show their rankings after stage one. 

“What’s going on?” Tris asked as she stepped up to the crowd. “I thought that there weren’t going to be any cuts until stage three?”

“There aren’t, but it’s just a progress report,” Will explained. 

Tris looked up at the board and her heart leapt up into her throat as she saw that she was first. Peter was second, but as she looked at their average times, she realized that there was a ten minute gap between the two of them. 

Her heart started to pound. She should probably have been pleased that she was first, but she thought about what had happened to Edward after he’d placed first above Peter.

Peter slowly turned around, and Tris took half a step back from him. She would have preferred a glare to the look of pure hatred that he was giving her now. As he walked past her, he shoved her up against the wall. 

“I will not be outranked by a stiff,” he hissed. “How did you do it, huh? Did you fuck Eric to get him to lower your time?”

“Leave her alone!” Will growled as he yanked Peter away from Tris. “Only a coward bullies somebody who’s clearly better than they are!”

“Are you blind or just stupid?” Peter scoffed as he shrugged off Will’s hand. “She’s going to edge you out of the rankings because she knows how to manipulate people!” Peter stormed out from the room, followed by Molly and Drew.

“Thanks,” Tris said gently to Will.

“Is he right?” Will asked. “You do spend an awful lot of time away from the group, and we see you walking and talking with Eric frequently.”

“I’m just doing the best that I can, like the rest of you! Nothing has happened between me and Eric! He’s my instructor, and I talk to him sometimes, that’s all! Being from Erudite, you’d think that you’d value wanting to get the best education, no matter what the subject!” But as Tris looked at Will, she could see that he didn’t believe a word that she was saying. 

“Come on, let’s go,” Christina said with a sneer sent in Tris’s direction. The two of them walk out from the room, which left Tris alone in the room. 

 

* * *

Tris found it hard to get to sleep that night. She was worried about what might happen to her should she let her guard down for even a second. Even though it had been a week since Edward had been stabbed, the sound of his scream echoed through her head as if it had only happened a few hours ago. 

After a while, everybody’s breathing evened out into the regular sounds of sleep. Tris slipped out of bed and went out into the hall. She walked over to the water fountain that was a bit down from the door of the dorm; she wasn’t thirsty, but she needed to have something to do or else she would fall asleep. The only light in the hall was a tiny, blue light above the drinking fountain. 

She reached the fountain, pulled her hair over her shoulder so that it wouldn’t get wet, and bent over. Then, Tris was roughly grabbed from behind. 

She started to scream, but a hand clasped over her mouth. The hand smelt like soap and was big enough to cover the lower half of Tris’s face. Tris thrashed wildly and bit at the hand. 

“OW!” a rough voice cried out.

“Shut up and keep her mouth covered!” That voice belonged to Peter. 

Somebody roughly shoved a piece of cloth into Tris’s mouth and tied it around the back of her head. With the cloth in her mouth, Tris couldn’t make anything more than strained noises. Somebody then shoved a cloth sack of some sort over her head and picked her up roughly. 

“I wonder what it sounds like when a stiff begs for mercy?” Peter says with a chuckle. “Hurry up.”

Tris inhaled deeply as she was carried along. Lemongrass and sage. The same type of soap that Al used. Her stomach twisted itself into knots at the thought. 

After a moment, the sound of water crashing against rocks reached her ears, and Tris started to try and struggle again. She knew that they were going to throw her into the Chasm. 

“Drop here there,” Peter said. 

“But what about-” Drew said. 

“I said drop her!” Peter hissed, and Al roughly dropped Tris onto the ground. Her head smacked against the hard floor and made little stars dance in front of her vision. “If she’s so willing to fuck Eric in order to get ahead, I wonder what she’d be willing to do in order for me to not kill her?” Peter’s heavy hand fisted in the fabric of Tris’s shirt and he tore it apart. “Are you sure that you’re sixteen, stiff? You look like you can’t be a day older than twelve.” The other boys laughed. Tris breathed heavily through her nose in order to not be sick. She’d drown in her vomit if she threw up. 

Peter’s hands fumbled to undo the button on her pants, but Tris kicked up and nailed him in the chest. She scrambled to pull the fabric off from over her head, but somebody pinned her back onto the ground. 

“HEY!” somebody shouted out. There was a loud bang sound— a gun, maybe? 

“Shit, run!” Peter hissed. Tris heard the sound of Peter, Drew, and Al running off, and a fourth person running closer to her. She was certain that whoever it was would chase after the three boys, but instead, something dropped over her bare chest.

“Tris,” Eric whispered. He gently lifted up her shoulders and pulled the sack off from her head. Then, he quickly cut off the gag and pulled it out from her mouth. Tris’s vision swam before everything went black. 

 

* * *

When Tris came to, she was surrounded by darkness. Not the overly oppressive darkness of the dorms, but rather, a darkness that was lit by the natural lights of outside. She sat up and the blanket and jacket that were covering her torso slipped down onto the bed. She was still wearing that tank top that Peter had ripped apart, but somebody had taken care to make sure that she was covered appropriately. 

Tris pulled her ruined shirt off, dropped it onto the floor, and pulled the jacket on. It was a little too big for her, warm, made out of leather, and smelt like Eric. He must have brought her up to his apartment after she’d passed out. 

She got out of the bed and moved across the room to go find him. She scanned the front room before she moved down the wall to the only other door in the apartment. It lead to a tiny bathroom, but Eric wasn’t in there, either. 

As Tris went to go back into the bedroom, the front door opened and Eric came in. Tris pulled the sides of the jacket closer around her, even though it already covered everything that it needed to. 

“Tris,” Eric said when he saw her standing against the wall. “You shouldn’t be up. You hit your head really hard.”

“I was looking for you,” Tris explained as she wrapped her arms more securely around herself.

“I was personally escorting Drew to the infirmary,” Eric explained. “Peter and Al ran off. Drew claimed that they were just trying to scare you, but it was hard to tell because I knocked a couple of his teeth out.”

“Good,” Tris said roughly. Her throat felt thick and her eyes burned. She leaned against the wall and started to cry. 

Eric crossed the room in two long strides and quickly scooped Tris up into his arms. He cradled her against his chest and carried her back into the bedroom, where he lay her down on the bed once again. He pulled away from her as quickly as he’d picked her up, and went across the room. He pulled something out from a dresser, and tossed it onto her. “Change into that, if you want to. I’ll go get an ice-pack for your head.”

Once Eric had shut the door behind him, Tris sat up in the bed. She rubbed at her eyes with the jacket cuff before she pulled it off and quickly pulled the shirt Eric had given her on. It was too big, but it was better than nothing. 

After a minute, Eric gently knocked on the door. “Are you dressed?” he asked.

“Yes,” Tris croaked out. Eric came back into the room holding an ice pack. He sat on the edge of the bed and pressed it gently to the side of Tris’s head. Now that he was facing the light instead of standing in front of it, she could see that his lip was split and that his knuckles were split and bloody. 

Tris lifted a shaking hand and pressed her fingers gently against Eric’s injured lip. A millimeter to the right and whoever had punched him would have hit his lip ring. Maybe they had hit it; there was no way for her to tell. 

“I’m alright,” Eric reassured her. “But I cannot say the same of Peter once I get my hands on him.” He gently grabbed her wrist with the hand that wasn’t holding the ice-pack to her head and put Tris’s hand down on her lap. “I should report this.”

“No,” Tris said quickly. “I don’t want them to think that I’m afraid of them.” She pressed her lips together and felt fresh tears come to her eyes.

“It’s okay to be scared here,” Eric whispered. He gently stroked her head. “You’re safe.”

“Al…” Tris whimpered as the tears fell onto her cheeks. 

“He wanted for you to be the small, quiet girl from Abnegation. He hurt you because your inner strength made him feel weak. He is nothing but trash.” He put the ice-pack down onto Tris’s chest and stood. “You’re going to need your rest if you’re going to destroy them in stage three.”

“I don’t want you to go,” Tris said, her voice a gentle whisper. Eric paused by the door.

“Tris,” he croaked. “This-”

“Isn’t appropriate?” Tris said, her voice flat. “Peter’s already accused me of sleeping with you in order to get ahead.”

“We both know that that isn’t true,” Eric said. He opened the door, but didn’t leave the room immediately. “Get some rest.” 

 

* * *

Tris spent the night wrapped up in the scent of Eric. She was overly warm under the blankets on his bed, but she didn’t want to kick them off least the comforting smell leave somehow. She awoke to the sound of the shower running in the next room, and cracked her eyes open to see that the sky was incrementally lighter than it had been when she’d closed them. 

She sat up in the bed and looked around the room. It was a lot easier to see the items now that it was a little bit lighter. Tris got out of bed and padded across to the dresser, where a small hand mirror mirror was propped up against the wall. She picked it up and looked at her reflection— a giant bruise was forming on the side of her face from where she’d been dropped on the ground. 

She found her hair tie sitting on top of the dresser, and she pulled her hair back into a ponytail. The door opened and Eric walked in, his hair and skin still wet from the shower. He was holding a towel in his hand. 

“Hi,” Tris whispered, her voice soft. 

“How’s your head?” Eric asked as he crossed over to Tris. He put a gentle hand under her chin and tipped the bruised side of her face towards the window to get a better look at it.

“Fine,” Tris said. It was a lie, but she figured that Eric probably knew that. But she also knew that things could be a lot worse; she could be floating in the river. She figured that Eric knew that, too.

“You should go,” Eric said as he pulled his hand away from Tris. “Get to the dorm before I show up to demand that everybody run laps.”

“Right,” Tris said. She turned and walked to the door to the living room. 

“Tris, wait,” Eric said as she walked through the doorway. She half turned to him, and he handed her a key. 

“What is this?” Tris asked with some confusion. 

“For the apartment,” Eric explained. “There’s only a week of initiation training left, but that’s a week that you’ll have to spend sleeping in the same room as Peter, Drew, and Al.”

“Right,” Tris said slowly. She knew that she’d have to face all three of them, but she hadn’t really thought much about what might happen that night. Or the nights for the rest of the week until the training was over. She’d barely survived last night, and it was only because Eric had shown up. She didn’t exactly want to test her luck a second time. “But I don’t want to put you out,” Tris protested after a moment. 

Eric gave her a hard look. Two weeks ago, when she was the uncertain girl from Abnegation, it would have scared the shit out of her. However, now that she knew him a little bit better, she knew that it was his “stop being stupid” look. “If the price that I have to pay to know that you aren’t at the bottom of the Chasm is to sleep on my sofa for a week, then so be it,” he said simply. “Go.” Tris didn’t need to be told twice and hurried from his apartment. 

Tris went down to the dorm and had just hidden the key inside her Abnegation dress when Eric burst into the room. “Three laps, one hour!” he barked. 

When Tris walked into the dining hall, she kept her head down as she went over to where Christina and Will were. As she sat down, Uriah came over to join them. “What happened to you?” Will asked. Tris lifted her eyes from her muffin to look around the room. She knew that Eric had put Drew in the hospital, but Al was nowhere to be seen. Peter was the only one that she saw. He was eating some toast and laughing about something that Molly had said to him. As if last night hadn’t happened. Her hand clenched on the edge of the table. 

“Peter, Drew…” Tris started. “And…” She swallowed hard. “And Al.”

“Oh my god,” Christina whispered, her eyes wide.

“Are you alright?” Uriah asked. Peter’s eyes meet Tris’s across the room, and Tris forced herself to look away. She gave an absent shrug. 

“But you’re just…” Uriah started, but trailed off. He pressed his lips together. “It isn’t fair. Three against one?”

“Yeah, because Peter is all about what’s fair,” Christina said with a roll of her eyes. “That’s why he stabbed Edward’s eye when he was asleep.” She shook her head. “Al, though? Are you sure?”

Tris turned and looked Christina in the eye as she said “I’m sure.”

“It’s got to be desperation,” Will said. “He’s been acting… I don’t know. Like a different person? Ever since stage two started.” 

Just then, Drew shuffled into the dining hall. Tris’s jaw dropped open. His face was swollen and mostly purple, his lips were twice their usual size, and there was a cut that ran through his eyebrow. Drew kept his eyes down until he reached Peter’s table. Tris’s eyes found Eric’s, and she saw that he looked like the cat who’d gotten the canary. 

“Did you do that?” Will hissed. 

“No, but I wish that I had,” Tris replied with a slight shake of her head. “Somebody— I never found out who— found me before…” She swallowed hard. “At first, I thought that they were just going to throw me into the Chasm, but then they threw me down onto the ground and Peter ripped my shirt off. Then, there was this loud bang and they took off running.”

Christina gave Tris a sad look, but Will only just glared at the table. “We have to do something about this,” Uriah said, his voice low. 

“What, like beat them up?” Christina asked. “I think that somebody did that already.”

“No, we have to edge them out of the rankings. That will permanently damage their futures. It’s hard to be tough when you’re in Abnegation.”

“Transfers!” Lauren said as she strode into the middle of the dining hall. “You’re going to be with me today!” She flashed them all a brilliant smile. 

“See you later,” Tris said to Uriah as they got up to follow the other instructor from the room. 

 

* * *

Lauren lead them to a room that they hadn’t been to before. “This is a different kind of simulation known as the fear landscape. It has been disabled for our purposes, so it’ll be different the next time that you see it,” she started. “Through your simulations, we have collected information about your worst fears, and your fear landscape will present them to you as an obstacles that you must work to overcome. The difference between stage two and stage three is that you will be aware in the simulation.”

Tris let out a startled breath. She wasn’t sure if it would be a good thing or a bad thing… At the least, maybe nobody would question too much if she started to spray fire from her hands and made it rain marshmallows. 

Lauren went on, “The number of fears that you will face in your landscape will depend on how many that you have.” Tris tried to think about how many that she had. “As you have been told before, stage three focuses on mental preparation because it requires you to control both your emotions as well as your body.” She stops and looks around at all of them. “In one week, you will go through your fear landscape as quickly as you possibly can in front of the Dauntless leaders.” Eric had told her that already. “It will be your final test. Just as stage two was weighed more heavily than stage one, stage three is weighted the heaviest of all. Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” they said in unison. 

“Good. I suggest that you take the next week to consider your fears and develop strategies to face them.”

“That doesn’t sound fair,” Peter spoke up. “What if one person has seven fears but somebody else has twenty? It’s not their fault.”

Lauren considered him for a moment. “Do you really want to talk to me about what’s fair?” she said dryly. She offered him a cheeky smirk. “But I can understand why you’re worried, though. After all, last night certainly proved that you are nothing but a miserable coward.”

Tris’s jaw went slack. Had Eric told her about what had happened?

“We all know that you’re afraid of a tiny girl from Abnegation.” 

Peter’s face flushed with embarrassment or anger; it was hard for Tris to tell. The others all laughed a little at that. 

 

* * *

Tris went back to the dorm with Christina and Will. Al was there; his face was red and swollen from crying. The scent of lemongrass and sage turned sour in Tris’s nose.

“Tris,” Al started. His voice cracked. “Can I talk to you?”

“Are you kidding? You aren’t even allowed to be near her!” Will snapped at him. 

“I won’t hurt you. I never wanted to…” Al broke off and buried his face in his hands. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry, I’m so sorry… I don’t… I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Please forgive me, please…” He reached for Tris, but she jerked away from his hand. 

“Stay away from me,” she spat at him. “Never come near me again. If you do, I swear that I will kill you. You are nothing but a coward.”

 

* * *

A rough pounding on the front door of Eric’s apartment awoke Tris. In the back of her mind, she knew that Eric was a Dauntless leader and probably had to deal with things like midnight emergencies all of the time. However, it was still a bit of a surprise to her to be awoken in such a way. “Sorry to disturb your sleep, but we’ve got a Chasm jumper,” Tris heard somebody say. She heard Eric let out a frustrated sigh. 

“Do we know who it is yet?” Eric said after a beat. 

“One of the initiate transfers, Albert Boyd,” the other man replied quickly. Tris’s hand flew to her mouth with horror and she half-fell against the wall. “They’re working to pull him up now.”

“Thank you,” Eric said absently. “I’ll be down in a minute.” Tris heard him shut the door and a second later, he came into the bedroom. He looked at Tris. “It would be strange of you if you didn’t show up,” he said simply before he turned and left the room. Tris nodded and forced herself into action. She fell into step behind Eric as they walked quickly down the hall to the elevator. 

When they get down to the main floor, they both pick up the pace. There was quite a crowd gathered in the Pit, and Tris instantly started to look for Christina, and then found her near the front. 

Two men stood near the ledge, and were hoisting something up with ropes. A dark shape appeared above the ledge, and some more Dauntless rushed forward to help the men haul it over the rail. 

The thing fell onto the floor with a loud, wet thud. Al’s body, bloated from being in the water. Christina buried her head into Tris’s shoulder and started to sob, but Tris couldn’t look away. Al’s eyes were open and, despite how lifeless that they were, they seemed to be staring straight into Tris’s soul. 

“One of the initiates,” somebody whispered behind where Tris stood. “What happened?”

“Same thing that happens every year,” somebody else replied. “He pitched himself over the ledge.”

“Don’t be so morbid. It could have been an accident.”

“Yes, whoops, I tripped over my shoelace and landed in the middle of the Chasm?”

Christina tightened her grip on Tris, so much so that it started to hurt. Tris thought that maybe she should tell Christina to let go, but can’t find the power to move at the moment. 

Somebody knelt in front of Al and brushed their fingers across Al’s eyes to close them. 

Tris couldn’t breathe. She sunk onto her knees, and in doing so, dragged Christina down with her. 

There was a shuffle of movement behind Tris, and she looked up to watch as somebody walked forward with a body bag. Tris pulled her arm free from Christina, clambered to her feet, spun around, and took off running. 

 

* * *

“Here,” Tori said as she held a steaming mug in front of Tris’s face. “Drink it. It’ll make you feel better. Promise.”

“I don’t think that tea is the solution,” Tris said, but she took the mug anyway. It smelt like peppermint and it created a warm, cozy feeling inside of her as she drank it. 

“I didn’t say ‘good’,” Tori said as she sat down in the chair across from Tris. “That’s not a word that you’re going to be using for a while.”

“How…” It felt like the words were stuck in Tris’s throat. “How long did it take for you to be okay again? After your brother?”

“I don’t know,” Tori said with a slight shake of her head. “Some days, I feel like I’m still not okay. Others, I feel fine. Happy even. It took me a few years to stop plotting my revenge.”

“Why did you stop?” Tris asked. Tori was silent for a moment. The only sound was of Tori’s fingernail as it tapped against the metal leg of the chair. 

“I don’t think of it as stopping,” she finally said. “It’s more like… I’m waiting for an opportunity.” 

Tris wanted to tell the older woman about the Allegiant, about how the divergents have banded together to try and put a stop to people killing them just for being different. She couldn’t find the words though, so she remained silent. 

Tori checked her watch. “It’s time to go.” 

Tris set the mug down and stood to followed Tori from the back of the tattoo parlor. As they got to the Pit, the overwhelming smell of alcohol hit Tris. A woman in front of Tris lurched to the right, having lost her balance. Tori grabbed onto Tris’s arm and steered her away. 

“I see my friends now,” Tris said. 

“Alright,” Tori agreed, and Tris parted from the older woman. Christina’s eyes were swollen from crying. Uriah offered Tris a silver flask, but she declined with a shake of her head. 

Eric climbed up onto a box that had been placed by the railing, and the talking gradually died down until the only sounds were that of the waterfall behind Eric. “Thank you,” he said. “As you know, we’re here because Albert Boyd, an initiate, jumped into the Chasm last night. We do not know why, and it would be easy for us to mourn the loss of him tonight. But we did not choose an easy life when we became Dauntless. And the truth is that Albert is now exploring an unknown, uncertain place. He leapt into vicious waters to get there. Who among us would be brave enough to venture into that darkness without knowing what lies beyond it? Albert was not yet one of our members, but we can be assured that he was one of the bravest!”

The Dauntless start to cry out; their roar echoed the roar of the water. Christina took the flask from Uriah and drank. Will slid his arm around her shoulders and pulled her to his side. 

“We will celebrate him now, and remember him always!” Eric yelled. Somebody handed him a bottle, and he lifted it up into the air. “To Albert the Courageous!”

“To Albert!” the crowd shouted. Then, they started to chant his name, over and over. The syllables ran together until it no longer sounded like a name and instead, just turned into a primal scream. 

Tris turned away from all of that and walked away.

 

* * *

 

“Tris,” she heard Eric call out from the other side of the hall that she was walking down. She turned around to face him.

“He wasn’t brave!” she whispered once he was closer to her. “He was depressed and a coward and he almost killed me and participated in me being sexually assaulted! Is that the kind of thing that we respect here?!”

“You think that I don’t know that?” Eric snapped at her. “In a week, most of the Dauntless members won’t even remember his name. Fuck, I’d be surprised if they could remember his name in the morning, the rate that they’re going.” He heaved a deep sigh and looked at Tris. “It doesn’t mean anything, okay? It’s… just something that we say. It would be strange of me to step up onto the box and tell everybody that he was a little piece of shit who deserved to die.”

Tris nodded but didn’t say anything. Eric offered her the bottle that he’d been given minutes earlier. She accepted it and took a tentative drink; the liquid burned her throat and she coughed a little. She took a bigger swallow before she passed the bottle back to Eric. 

He wrapped his arm around her waist. Tris moved around until she was pressed up against his chest and wrapped her arms around him. Her fingers skimmed the muscles on his back through his shirt. After a moment, he moved his free hand to smooth down her hair. Tris squeezed her eyes shut. 

“Should I be crying?” Tris asked, her voice muffled by his shirt. “Is there something wrong with me that I can’t cry over this?”

“You think that I know anything about tears?” Eric replied quietly. Her fingers tightened in the fabric of his shirt. 

“If I had forgiven him, do you think that he’d be alive now?”

“No,” Eric said blankly. Tris pulled back to look at him, confusion all over her face. “I think that he is a coward who followed along with whatever the toughest person around told him to do. And if you had forgiven him, he might be alive right now, but exactly how long do you think that it would have been before he jumped? A week? A month? A year? I think that it would have been his end, no matter what.”

Eric leaned forward and pressed his lips to Tris’s forehead, between her eyebrows. Tris’s fingers twisted in the fabric of his shirt. She pulled her face away but only to rest her forehead on his shoulder instead. 

They both lost track of how long that they stood like that. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, please let me know if you spotted any weird grammatical errors.
> 
> Reviews and kudos are always appreciated; it'll only take a second for you to write out something or to press a button.


	8. Chapter 8

Tris’s shoulder stung as she tossed Erudite newspapers that dated back from the past six months into the Chasm. She knew that it wouldn’t make the hurtful, slanderous reports magically go away, but it made her feel better. Her shoulder was a little sore because, following the funeral, Christina had dragged her and Will to the tattoo parlor. Like before the funeral, the only person who’d been at the shop had been Tori, and Tris had felt very comfortable asking for one, finishing touch to the tattoo that spiraled around her right shoulder. 

When she’d sat down to discuss the tattoo with the artist the other week, she’d only had half of a mind of what she wanted to do. Or, so she’d told the artist. But now, after Al’s death, she felt brave enough to tell Tori what one last thing that she’d need to make it complete. Flames spiraled across her shoulder and down her arm a little bit, and, on her shoulder blade where no one would be able to see it, there were grey hands that were spewing the flame. The helping hands of Abnegation that turned into Dauntless. 

Even though Tris was certain that she was not going to end back in Abnegation, she also knew that it was a big part of who she was. She couldn’t just ignore the first sixteen years of her life, even though the community obviously expected for her to. 

Christina handed Tris another stack of papers. There was a picture of Jeanine on the first one, and, even in the low resolution of the news-print photograph, her sharp eyes seemed to follow Tris until she threw the paper into the Chasm. 

“Have you ever met her?” Tris asked Will as she threw another paper in. 

“Jeanine? Once,” he said as he threw another paper into the river. Tris got the feeling that he was really only there to prove to her that he didn’t agree with the things that Erudite had to say. “She’s so smart, you can see it before she says a single thing. She’s like a walking computer.”

“What do you think of what she’s got to say?” Tris asked as she threw another paper over. 

“Just that maybe it might be nice if there was more fresh food to go around. And cars not for work-related things,” Will said slowly. Tris tossed the rest of the papers in her arms into the Chasm and turned to face Will.

“You do realize that there isn’t some magically invisible warehouse in the city where they’re keeping all of those cars, right?” she snarled at him.

“Look,” Will said as he took a cautious step back. “I was in Erudite, and I know how they function. They wouldn’t release something without certifiable facts!”

“I’m sorry, but I must have missed the cited sources between all of the salacious lies,” she snarled at him. “I don’t know what Erudite has against Abnegation, but they’re going to tear the entire city apart if they keep doing this.”

“Hey now,” Christina said as she stepped between the two of them and gently pushed them away. “This was supposed to be a lighthearted session of symbolic document destruction, not a political debate.”

Tris’s nostrils flared with annoyance and she half turned away from the two of them. But then, she looked up to observe the two of them from the corner of her eye. Even though Christina had dropped the hand that she’d used to push Tris away, she had yet to remove the hand from Will’s chest. 

“Okay, so maybe she’s completely out of line with all of that stuff about your parents,” Will went on slowly. “But you were only just a child. There might be something fishy going on with the food distribution. After all, they are in charge of planting, growing, and harvesting, as well as taking care of the animals.”

“Yes, but the Erudite over-see everything!” Tris snapped at him. “So if they think that Abnegation are hiding food from the rest of the city, then they’re basically admitting to the entire city that the entire set up is completely flawed!”

“Okay, I think that it’s bed time now,” Christina said rather urgently. Tris looked up from the ground and saw Eric lurking in the shadows of a nearby hallway. How long had he been there? How much had he heard? Not like she was overly worried about that. If anything, Eric knew more than anybody about the shit that was going on in the city. 

“Sorry, there’s something that I have to do real quick,” Tris said. 

“Are you sure that you should be on your own in the city?” Christina asked with a hint of worry in her voice. 

“I won’t be alone, I’ll be with Eric,” Tris explained, and motioned towards him with her chin. They turned, a little startled to see their instructor standing there, half-obscured by the shadows. 

“Alright,” Christina said as she and Will started to walk towards the hall that would take them to the dorm. “We’ll see you later, then.” Tris walked over to where Eric stood. 

“I should probably write you up a fine for littering,” he said when she got closer. 

“But you aren’t going to?” Tris asked as she raised her eyebrow. 

“Nah, most people throw a lot of crap into the Chasm,” Eric said. “Besides, there’s some part of me that understands. But, I normally just go a hit a punching bag when I need to let off a little steam.”

“I don’t think that that would help much,” Tris said. Eric pushed himself away from the wall, turned around, and started walking towards the elevator that would take them up to his apartment. Tris trailed after him. 

“No, probably not,” Eric said. “So it’s probably a good thing that the water will move it out of Dauntless, or else I might have you get down there to pick it up.” Eric pressed the button for the elevator, and the doors slid open. They got on, and Tris watched as the numbers climbed higher until it came to a stop and the doors opened again. Tris followed after him as he walked down to his apartment, and then went inside when he opened the door. 

“Don’t you think that people will think that it’s odd that I’ve been spending the night here?” Tris asked after Eric had shut the door. 

“Have your friends noticed that you aren’t there at night?” Eric asked. 

It took Tris about two seconds to think about the answer to that. “No,” she said quickly. 

“Then there’s your answer. If your friends didn’t even notice, then I highly doubt that anybody else will,” Eric said. He went to turn on the solar-powered generator that had been charging in his room all day, and Tris followed after him. 

“Hey, can I ask you something?” she said as she looked down at her shoes. 

“You just did, but I’ll stop being a wise-ass now,” Eric said with a cocky grin as the lights in the apartment came on. 

Tris twisted her fingers together for a moment and couldn’t look at him. “Why me?” she finally asked. She still didn’t look up from her shoes. “Are you helping me because my mom asked you to look out for me?”

“I didn’t even know that you were her daughter until she came to see you,” Eric explained. He ran a hand through his hair. “I mean, I knew that you had the same last name that she did, but at the same time, I didn’t really put two and two together.”

“Right,” Tris said slowly. Eric had offered to train her for stage one before her mom had come. “But that doesn’t answer my question.” 

Eric crossed the room quickly and got into Tris’s personal space. He leaned his forearm against the wall above Tris’s head and looked down at her with a cocky smile. Tris felt her face heat up and she could hear her heart thumping in her ears. But despite how awkward that she felt, she couldn’t bring herself to look away from Eric’s face. 

“This is the second year that I’ve overseen part of the initiation training,” Eric said, his voice gentle and low. “Last year, there was a girl from Abnegation. Like you. She was small and soft-spoken when she first came here. Like you. But then she started to find herself after she realized that her strong opinions were no longer restricted and viewed as being overly selfish. She barely avoided being cut in stage one, but that’s not exactly any surprise whatsoever. She was determined, though, and she did well in stage two. Too well.”

Tris swallowed hard. “What happened to her?” she stammered out. 

“Another Peter got to her. I couldn’t get to her in time, and she was already at the Chasm. There was no question in anybody’s mind that it had been homicide, because her throat had been slit, and her wrists were bound behind her back. People who kill themselves don’t do those things before they jump.” The hard look in Eric’s eyes softened and he ran the hand not above Tris’s head down her arm. “But you aren’t Michelle.”

“Did you love her?” Tris whispered.

“No. I didn’t want to give my heart to her. There’s no rules against initiate-teacher relationships here, and at sixteen, one is technically an adult. But I didn’t want to get attached to her.”

“And me?” Tris asked, her voice even lower. 

“I’ve only known you for a little less than three weeks now, how can you ask if I love you?” Eric replied, his voice matching Tris’s volume. 

Tris’s heart caught in her throat, and she stammered out, “I’m not Michelle.”

“No,” Eric agreed gently. The hand that had been rubbing her arm lifted up. He tangled his fingers in her hair. “You remind me a lot of her and I think that you would have been great friends. But you are very different from her.” He leaned in closer to her. Tris’s heart was hammering so loud, she wondered why he didn’t seem able to hear it. “Get to bed, stiff,” he whispered in her ear. He pulled away and strode casually from the room as if nothing had happened. 

Tris sagged against the wall and let out a shaky breath she hadn’t known that she’d been holding. 

 

* * *

Tris awoke to the sound of Eric starting up the shower the next morning. She threw her arm over her eyes and let out a sigh of annoyance. She had a few minutes until she had to leave to get to the dorm before Eric went to make everybody run their three laps for the day, and she was overly annoyed that she wouldn’t be able to spend them asleep. 

Tris mulled over how strange that her situation had become very abruptly. One minute, a normal initiate, the next, the teacher’s pet who crashed on his bed. It was bizarre to her how quickly that she’d become adjusted to living with him, but thought that the situation probably wouldn’t last much beyond the end of the week and stage three. Eric seemed pretty certain that she was going to go on to become a full Dauntless member, and then she’d likely be given a place of her own. 

Then, her mind drifted to the conversation that she’d had with him last night. Tris tried to recall a girl a year ahead of her who’d joined Dauntless, but her mind drew a blank. They kept the students pretty segregated by age at school, and if anybody had known her, it would have been her brother. 

Was this entire thing because she reminded Eric of the girl that he’d once liked but failed to protect? Tris tried to recall what he’d said to her the night that she’d spent in the hospital with a concussion.  “I know that look in your eyes, Tris. The look of pure determination. The look of wanting to prove to the world that you made the right decision. Because people look at you, and they see a wimpy, little girl from Abnegation who made a mistake.”

What had their relationship been like? Had Michelle told Eric that she felt like she’d made a mistake by joining Dauntless? Did she look around at the other initiates from the year before and felt as if they thought that she’d made a mistake joining the faction?

When Eric knocked on the door to the bedroom a few minutes later, Tris was still lying in the same position with her arm over her eyes. “I did not make a mistake by joining Dauntless because I am Dauntless,” she said lowly. 

“I know,” Eric said simply. 

 

* * *

The rest of the week until the final test seemed to crawl to Tris. She knew how to manipulate the simulations already thanks to her training with Eric, so working inside of Lauren’s fear landscape was just extra practice for her. 

It was the day before the final test, the one in front of all of the Dauntless leaders. Tris had already finished her last practice fear landscape and was just wandering aimlessly around the compound for a lack of anything better to do while the others finished. “I bribed Adam to let me see the initiate scores before tomorrow,” a voice said from around the corner to where Tris was. “If you hadn’t insisted on messing around with that stiff before we threw her into the Chasm, I wouldn’t be looking at a lifetime of grey clothing and feeding the homeless. Me and Molly both.” Drew. Tris stopped up short, hardly daring to breathe least she be discovered. 

“She hasn’t been sleeping in the dorms,” Peter said shortly. “She only comes in a few minutes before Eric does. She’s probably spending her nights with him now that we’ve called them out.”

“We shouldn’t mess with her, though,” Drew went on a bit nervously. “I’m lucky that Eric didn’t kill me when we tried to kill the stiff.”

“You’re too much of a chicken shit, Drew. You probably would have been better off picking Abnegation to begin with if this is how it’s going to be,” Peter snapped. Tris didn’t want to hear any more. She turned and ran back to the dorm, where she fished out the key to Eric’s apartment that he’d given her. 

Once she was inside, she turned on the generator and turned the lights on. She stood by the bedroom window for a long time, just thinking about what she’d overheard. Drew and Molly might not attack her, safe as she was in Eric’s apartment at night, but she worried for Christina and Will. 

After a while, she turned around to examine the bookshelf that sat in the corner of the room. She only ever came up here to sleep, and hadn’t had any opportunity to look at the book that he had. It was an odd collection of non-fiction books that looked like he might have taken them from the school all the way to high fantasy and romance. Tris guessed that he just enjoyed reading whatever he could get his hands on. Books weren’t exactly valued in Dauntless and they were difficult to find in the stores, as Tris had come to find out. 

She reached for the book that looked the most worn because she wanted to read something that he’d obviously read a lot. It was a non-fiction book that she’d never seen before; it looked incredibly old. The title was too worn for her to make out, so she went over to the bed, sat down with her back against the headboard, and opened it to the front cover. “The History of the Divided City”.

She kept reading until the front door of the apartment opened. “Tris?” Eric called out. Tris put the book on the nightstand and went out into the main room. “There you are. Dinner’s started already.”

“Oh,” she said blankly. “I was reading and lost all track of time. Listen, there’s something that I have to tell-”

“Later, okay? I have a meeting that I’m already late for, but I wanted to track you down before that,” Eric said as he opened the door. Tris nodded slightly and left the apartment. 

She walked by herself down to the elevator, but Eric didn’t come and join her. Tris went to the dorm to return the key to her locker, since she was a bit worried that she’d lose it. Since everybody was at dinner, she’d been expecting everybody to be at the dining hall, and was a little surprised to find Christina there. 

“Where have you been all day?” she asked when Tris walked in.

“Just around. I was thinking,” Tris said absently. 

“Well, I have something to tell you,” Christina said. She looked around the room as if to check that they really were alone. Then, she put her hands on Tris’s shoulders. “Can you be a girl for a few seconds?”

“I am a girl,” Tris said with a confused frown. 

“No, but like a silly, annoying girl,” Christina said with annoyance. 

“’Kay,” Tris said as she twirled a lock of hair around her finger. 

Christina flashed Tris a huge smile. “Will kissed me.”

“What? When? How? What happened?” Tris said as her hand dropped down to her side. 

“You can be a girl!” Christina said with a laugh. “Right after lunch, we were walking around near the train tracks. We were just talking about… Jeez, I don’t even remember. But then he stopped, leaned in, and kissed me.”

“Did you know that he liked you?” Tris asked. 

“No!” Christina said quickly. “The best part was, that was it. We just kept walking and talking like nothing had happened. And then I kissed him.”

“How long have you known that you liked him?”

“I don’t know. I guess that I didn’t. It’s just little things, you know? How he put his arm around me at Al’s funeral, how he opens the doors for me.”

Tris smiled at her friend, genuinely happy for her. She wanted to tell Christina about her relationship with Eric, whatever it might be, but doesn’t want for Christina to get the wrong idea. After all, it was bad enough that Peter had started rumors that Tris had slept her way to a better ranking. Instead, she just said, “I’m happy for you.”

“I’m happy, too,” Christina said. “I thought that it would be a long time before I would be able to be happy again.”

The two of them look around the dorm. The others had already started to pack up their things in preparation for moving into apartments after they were all tested tomorrow. Tris was really looking forward to being able to sleep in some privacy without feeling like she was kicking Eric out from his bed. Even though he insisted that he didn’t mind, she still felt bad about it. 

“I can’t believe that it’s almost over,” Christina said after a moment. “It feels like we just got here. But also… I haven’t seen my home in forever.”

“Do you miss it?” Tris asked. She missed her parents, and the ache inside of her had only gotten worse when she had seen her mother. 

“Yeah, but at the same time, Dauntless are just as loud as in Candor, so that makes things a little bit better to bear. But it’s a lot easier there. You always know where you stand with everybody; there’s no hidden agendas.” 

 

* * *

Tris sat in a chair and watched the screens in front of her. One of them showed the initiate who was currently going through their fear landscape. The other one showed the five Dauntless leaders. Their eyes were blank as they observed the simulation. 

Right now, Marlene was in her fear landscape. It wasn’t overly interesting to watch the people as they reacted to whatever was happening to them, especially because nobody else could see what was happening. After a minute, the screen with Marlene flashed green and then displayed her time. Down in the Pit where other screens were also showing the initiation final, a cheer went up.

“Transfers, the order in which you go through the test will be taken from your rankings,” Four explained to the waiting transfers. On the screen, the Dauntless leaders stood up and went over to Marlene to congratulate her. “So Drew will be first and Tris last.”

That doesn’t exactly make Tris feel any better. She’ll know how the others did and how fast that she’ll have to go through the landscape in order to beat them. 

She closed her eyes as Drew went through his landscape. It was so very easy for her to tune everything out right now. She was only aware of when somebody finished because of the loud cheer from the Pit each time. 

“Tris,” Eric called out at last. She got up and walked inside the room. Eric stood down on the floor with a syringe. “Ready?” he asked as he brushed her hair away from the side of her neck. She barely felt the needle as it pierced her flesh. 

The room before her transformed into the open field and ominous, grey sky. It was a sight that had become very familiar to Tris, despite the fact that she didn’t want for it to be. On cue came the loud crowing of the ravens as they started to flock towards her. Tris half-turned in the direction that they were coming from and threw up a brick wall just before they would have reached her. She heard the thump of feathered bodies as they ran against the sold brick wall.

A second later, however, the birds flew up over the wall. Tris flinched a little, wondering if they were going to attack her. They swirled together into three groups which slowly morphed into her parents and brother. Okay, this one was new. Tris was at least a little grateful that her mother and brother were dressed in the bland, grey clothing of Abnegation rather in the ways that she’d seen them last.

“Beatrice,” her mother started. Okay, so maybe it was only the ravens morphing into her parents that was new. The disapproval of her parents was something that she’d faced before in the simulations.

“Beatrice,” her father echoed. “It’s time for you to stop playing around now. You don’t belong in Dauntless.”

“You don’t belong,” Caleb echoed. 

“Stop it!” Tris yelled at them. “You’re one to talk because you left Abnegation, too!” She pointed at Caleb. She then points to her parents. “And if you’re really as selfless as you claim to be, you’d be happy for me having, not only decided upon this all on my own, but also making something of myself while I’m here!” 

Her family morphed into the Dauntless initiates. Tris now stood in the water tank. It was also something that she’d become overly familiar with. “You don’t belong,” her peers all chanted. “You don’t belong.” Water started to gush up from the floor. Before it could cover her feet, Tris leaned back and kicked out the glass. Unlike her first simulation where she found herself in the tank, the glass broke open on her first kick and water started to gush out into the room. 

The initiates rushed at her, lead by Peter. They grabbed her, hoisted her up, and lead her away from the now-broken tank. The Pit became the center of town. Tris was carried over to a pile of wood and a large, wooden stake. “Tie her up!” Peter commanded the others who were carrying her. 

Before Tris could even begin to struggle, she was hauled into an upright position and tied to the stake. Somebody had a lit torch, which they put up against the stacks of wood that Tris’s feet rested on. Tris looked up at the sky, and willed for giant, grey storm clouds to come in. A second later, it started to pour. The fire was extinguished before it could even begin to smoke. 

Tris dropped to her knees as the stake and pile of wood vanished. She looked up warily, wondering what was coming now. She’d gone through everything that she’d done with her own simulations before, but this one was completely new. As she stood up, she realized that she was standing in the hallway outside of where the dorms were. 

As she recognized the water fountain in front of her, she realized what was going on. She turned around before a giant hand could reach around and cover her mouth. “Al,” she whispered. Except rather than how he’d been before, his body was bloated and dripping wet, like when they’d pulled him up from the Chasm. She looked around a bit nervously, but didn’t see either Peter or Drew. It was only just her and Al. “Al,” she said again, a bit louder. 

“Tris, can I talk to you?” he said. His voice sounded like there was a lot of water in his lungs, but Tris could still understand him. Tris knew that there were a few different ways that this could pan out. Either she could humor her mind’s version of Al, or she could let it play out like it had the last time. She knows that if she lets things play out, then things will end the same way.

“You’re dead,” Tris says, more to remind herself that none of this is real. 

“I killed myself because of you,” Al said. “You said that you’d kill me if I came near you again, so I decided to do both of us a favor.”

“You attacked me!” Tris hissed at him. “You were going to help Peter throw me into the Chasm, and you stood by and did nothing as Peter tried to rape me! And you think for two seconds that I’m going to feel sorry for you that you became such a little chicken shit? Let me tell you something: you did the entire world a favor by jumping!” Al gave her a wounded look before he half-turned from her. 

The next thing Tris knew, she was standing in the testing room. The Dauntless leaders were blinking away the fog of being in the simulation as well. Eric stood and walked down to where she was. “Congratulations, you successfully completed your final evaluation,” he said to her.

Tris could only nod. She felt completely chilled, more so than when she went into her fear landscape a moment ago. The gurgling voice of Al echoed inside of her mind; the only thing that she wanted to do right now was to forget all about it. She can face the disappointment of her parents and brother, she can face her peers, but having to face Al as he accused her of being the sole reason why he jumped?

“The banquet will be in two hours,” Eric went on as he motions for Tris to leave the room. “Your ranking among the other initiates, Dauntless-born and transfers, will be announced then. Good luck.” 

Tris half-turned to look back at Eric, and she could see that there was more that he wanted to say to her. Possibly about what he’d just seen. But he looked over towards the other four leaders, and Tris knew that he wasn’t going to say anything. Not right now.

 

* * *

“You have no reason to be nervous,” Christina said to Tris as they walked into the dining hall. The hall was normally always very loud, but today, it was almost deafening. “I turned around to talk to Will for a second and then you were done.” Tris could only just shrug. 

“What job are you going to pick?” Tris asked to change the subject. 

“I think that I’d like to train the initiates,” Christina said after a moment of hesitation. “You know, to scare the everliving crap out of them. Fun stuff.”

“But it’s only a seasonal job,” Tris pointed out.

“Yes, there is that,” Christina said with some annoyance. “But what about you?”

“I honestly haven’t given it much thought,” Tris said blankly. “I guess that I could be an ambassador to the other factions. Being a transfer might help me out in the meetings.”

“I was hoping that you would pick Dauntless leader-in-training, because that’s all that Peter was talking about earlier.”

“I just hope that I’m ranked higher than he is,” Will said. He let out a loud groan. “Oh lord, it’s impossible.”

“No it isn’t,” Christina protested. She laced her fingers with his, and Tris looked away from them. 

A microphone squealed, and everybody eventually fell silent. “We aren’t big on speeches here, so I’m going to keep this short,” Eric said. “It’s a new year, and we have a pack of new members. We offer them our congratulations. Tomorrow, in their first acts as members, our top ten initiates will pick their professions in the order of which they’re ranked.”

The giant screen behind Eric, which had been displaying the date and time, flickered and their names appeared on it instead. Next to the number one was Tris’s picture and her name. 

She let out a breath that she hadn’t even known that she’d been holding. This was where she belonged, no matter what might have happened on her journey. She was Dauntless now.

As Christina jumped up and down with her joy, Tris’s eyes quickly scanned the rest of the list. Uriah was second, followed by Lynn and Marlene. Her stomach curled up when she saw that Peter was going to stay because he was number five.

She kept reading. Will was sixth and Christina seventh. Eleven and twelve were Molly and Drew. But she didn’t care, because she’d likely never see them again. 

As everybody celebrated, around her, Eric caught Tris’s eyes over the crowd, and gave a slight motion with his head towards one of the doors. Tris excused herself from the people around her, but she didn’t think that many noticed as she slipped from the room. 

Eric was waiting for her out in the hall. “Congratulations,” he said as she walked over to him. 

“Thanks,” she said. She stopped a few feet away from him. “I knew that I did well, but I didn’t think that I did that well.”

“You did,” Eric reassured her as he walked closer to her. He put his forearm on the wall above her head in an echo of the night before, but this time, he didn’t stop himself by leaning in to whisper into her ear. 

Their lips touched. Tris wrapped her arms around his waist and twisted her fingers into the fabric of his shirt. They pulled apart. “You wouldn’t believe how much I’ve been looking forward to doing that,” he whispered before they kissed again. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, please let me know if you spotted any typos or grammatical errors so that I might fix them.
> 
> If you're enjoying this, please take two seconds to leave kudos or a review.


	9. Chapter 9

If Tris had thought that it was a comfort to sleep in Eric’s bed and to be surrounded by the smell of him, it was nothing in comparison to actually being able to sleep next to him. They lay side-by-side in the bed. Tris’s legs were curled up and her knees touched his legs, and his arm was thrown over her waist. 

“Have you been with many women before?” Tris whispered. It was dark in the room, even with the natural lights from outside that crept in through the closed curtains. She could just barely see his outline in the dark.

“A few,” Eric admitted. 

“I’ve never been with anybody before,” Tris said after a beat. “Things are… very chaste in Abnegation. You don’t even so much as talk about relationships or romance with others.”

“So I figured,” Eric replied. “I’m not going to push you into doing anything that you don’t want to do.”

“I know,” Tris said lowly. She moved her arm back until she found Eric’s hand, and then laced her fingers through his. “It’s just for one night, though. Tomorrow, I’ll be assigned an apartment. You can have your bed back.”

“I don’t mind sharing, but I’m glad to not have to sleep on the sofa anymore. I don’t think that my back could take it.”

“Such an old man,” Tris said teasingly. 

“Shut up, stiff,” Eric replied, and closed the distance between them to kiss her. “Do you want to talk about your fear landscape?” he whispered, his lips inches from hers. 

“No,” Tris said quickly. “I’d prefer to put it from my mind completely.” She was silent for a moment.  "Well, yes and no," she said slowly. "I mainly don't want to talk about it because I don't want to think about it. I was just... I don't know. Super surprised that Al showed up like that. When..." She swallowed hard. "When I realized that I was in the hall where I was grabbed, I thought that I was going to have to relive all of that. All over again." She looked to Eric, as if waiting for a response. When he didn't offer anything, she continued. "But it was Al. Only just Al."

"You aren't to blame at all for what happened to him, Tris," Eric said gently. He pulled his hand away from hers so that he could rub her back. "He was a chicken-shit, as you said. And as I already told you the night that he was found, he would have probably killed himself sooner or later."

"Yes," Tris agreed slowly. She heaved a tired sigh and moved in closer to him. They were silent for a while. Eric continued to rub reassuring circles on her back.

"Have you thought about what job that you might like?" Eric asked after a long stretch of silence. His hand never stopped moving over her back.

"I was sort of thinking about becoming an ambassador for the other factions," Tris said quietly. "I think that the fact that I was in Abnegation might help me a lot. But I was talking with Christina before you announced the scores, and she said that the only thing that Peter was talking about was that he was going to be the new leader-in-training  "

"He is the exact opposite of anybody that I'd personally want to see in charge," Eric said quickly.

"Me, too," Tris agreed. "I don't want to be in a position of power. There's this idea that we had in Abnegation about how you should only put those in power who don't want to be.”

“That’s really stupid,” Eric said a bit sourly. “Just because they didn’t want to be in power doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to decide that having the power is nice and then suddenly become dictators.”

“That is also true,” Tris agreed after a moment. 

"But look at it this way: if Peter was in charge, what exactly do you think that he’d do to the entire faction? And forget about the relationship with the other three factions," Eric went on.

"I don't want to even so much as think about thinking about that," Tris said a bit sourly. Eric laughed. 

"Being a Dauntless leader isn’t so bad," Eric reassured her. "And the way that things are right now, you'd be the second pick if something happened to one of the current leaders. There's another person waiting to take over in case that happens, and then it would be you."

"What happened to the leader that you replaced?"

"A hilariously tragic hot tubbing accident," Eric said. It was too dark and Tris couldn't see his face to tell if he was being serious or not.

"You're just messing with me," she said after a moment of hesitation. 

"No, I'm being serious," Eric said. "They were trying to move a hot tub to be on his back patio and it fell on him. It was a freak accident."

"Honestly, you'd think that they would be more careful," Tris said with a snort. "So the guy was crushed to death, and now you're the leader."

"Pretty much," he agreed. 

"But until somebody else dies, what else would I have to do?" Tris asked after she’d mulled it over for a moment. 

"It's basically just a bunch of paperwork, sitting in on meetings to get the feel for what the issues in the faction are. Job training. You might not have to sit and watch all of the security cameras, but you have to know how to work them. And the same goes with the simulation programs."

"I think that it would be important to get more people who are divergent to look out for divergents in the simulations," Tris said. 

"Yes, we've got to protect them," Eric agreed. “It’s what your mom told me to do.” Tris fell silent for a long while; Eric thought that she might have fallen asleep. 

"Why are they so important? Why is my mom in charge of all of that?" she finally asked.

"I don't know," he said slowly. "But there is one thing that I know: tomorrow, when you're given your apartment, there's a very important piece of furniture that you're going to need."

"Furniture?" she asked with some surprise. 

"Yes, furniture. You honestly don't want to think about the mattress and the sofa that will be left over from the previous tenant," Eric said. Tris decided that she didn't want to know. And she defiantly didn't want to think about sleeping in the same bed as somebody who had only left the apartment because they'd died. 

 

* * *

The next morning, after breakfast, Tris and Eric walked up to the office where the five Dauntless leaders would talk with the ten newest members to discuss their future careers. All of the other new Dauntless members were sitting just outside of the meeting room on the hard, plastic chairs as they waited for Tris and Eric to show up.

Since Tris had placed first, she got first pick of jobs, something that she was very grateful for. If Peter got in there first, he would have picked leader-in-training. After she'd given it some though, Tris realized that she must take steps to prevent Peter from being in charge. Of pretty much anything. And maybe she might even find that she liked the job anyway. 

She knew that she'd get to work with Eric closely, so maybe it wouldn't be all that bad. 

The others looked up as the two of them walked down the hall where they sat outside the office. Tris could practically see that Peter was dying to say something about the fact that she and Eric had shown up at the same time, but something held him back. Tris hoped that it was the fact that he no longer had any friends. 

Eric opened the office door and ushered Tris in ahead of him. She went in and saw that the other four Dauntless leaders were already there, and there was another young man who sat in a chair in the corner. The four leaders sat behind a long table. There were two empty chairs; one of them was on the side that the other leaders sat behind, and the other faced the leaders. Tris sat opposite them while Eric took his seat by his peers.

“So for some introductions,” the oldest leader and the only female said once both Tris and Eric had gotten settled. “I’m April Almeida, this is Max Bates, Jeremy Scott, Steve Nguyen, and you already seem to know Eric.” Tris felt her heart start to hammer. Exactly how much of her relationship with Eric did they know about? Did they know that he'd only just kissed her for the first time last night, after she found out that she was a Dauntless member? “And this is Ken Moskowitz, a leader-in-training,” April continued, seemingly unaware of Tris’s current inner anxiety. “Welcome to Dauntless, and congratulations on placing first."

"Thank you," Tris said a bit shyly. It didn’t really matter what they thought about her relationship with Eric… right? But as Tris thought about it some more, she came to the conclusion that it wasn’t any of their business.

"Have you had any thoughts about what you might like to do now that you're a full-fledged Dauntless member?" April continued. 

"I was thinking that it might be nice to be the leader-in-training," Tris said without giving any other information. Eric had told the leaders about the things that Peter had done in the past three weeks, but they had chosen to do nothing about the problem. One initiate ended up dead, another gravely injured, the third was almost raped and killed by him, but still, they did nothing. The leaders didn't need to know that preventing the Peters of the future from causing that much harm to Dauntless initiates was her sole reason for wanting the job.

"Has Eric explained to you about what the job would entail and how you would become an actual leader instead of just a leader-in-training?" Jeremy asked her. 

"He said that I wouldn't become a leader unless two people died first," Tris said quickly. "And that I'd have to... train for all of the other jobs, in case something happened."

"Yes, that's right," April said with a slight nod of her head. She fidgeted on her tablet for a moment before she slid it across the table to Tris. "If you're sure about this, then I just need you to read through this contract agreement and sign your name at the bottom there." 

Tris accepted the tablet and started to read. It was a lot of legal jargon, and she wondered if Eric, with his upbringing in Erudite, had had a hand in writing it. It was mostly what Eric had told her last night, on top of a bunch of rules and stuff that she had to follow.

"Am I supposed to have this memorized?" Tris asked after a moment.

"Not right now, no, but Eric will make sure that you're given a copy of it later," Jeremy said. Tris nodded, and then skimmed through the rest of it before she signed her name at the bottom.

"Then it's settled," April said. She rose and offered Tris her hand. Tris shook hands with everybody before Eric escorted her to the door.

"I'll get a copy of the agreement to you after I finish up here," Eric said. In a lower voice he added, "And then we can go furniture shopping." 

"Alright," Tris agreed. 

"You'll want to go talk to the housing lady on the floor down from here," Eric said. "She'll get you all set up in an apartment."

"Alright," Tris said again. She flashed the others a smile as she walked past to go to the elevator. She could feel their curious gazes on her until the elevator door shut behind her.

 

* * *

 

The apartment that Tris had been assigned was in the same building as Eric's, and it was two floors below his. It was the same layout as his was, but it was much smaller. As Tris eyed the overly-worn sofa and the spring that stuck out from the middle cushion and the back, she was glad that Eric had promised to take her furniture shopping. She didn't want to even think about sitting on it. 

She hung her singular dress up in the closet before she folded the rest of what few clothes that she had and put them into the dresser. She'd have to go shopping to buy some more clothes later. Maybe Christina would want to help her. In fact, she started to think about all of the things that she would have to buy like soap, shampoo, laundry detergent, new sheets, towels...

Tris found an old pad of paper in a drawer in the kitchenette, found an old pencil, and started to jot down the things that she'd need. Maybe Eric would be willing to go all over town to help her pick up things. 

As Tris looked around her new bathroom, she thought that she spotted a faint red light in the corner of the mirror. She was instantly brought back to the morning before her aptitude test, and recalled everything that Eric had told her about the Watchers. She looked around the apartment a little bit and eventually found a screwdriver. She used it to pry the mirror off from the wall, and found that it wasn't a regular mirror like she'd thought, but one of those one-way mirrors. There wasn't anything but drywall behind the mirror, but there was a very small device attached to the upper corner of the mirror. 

Tris pried it off from the mirror, set it on the edge of the sink, and smashed it with the handle of the screwdriver. Then, she brushed all of the little pieces into the toilet and flushed it down. Tris knew that it wasn’t the only one in the apartment, but it was one less that she had to worry about. 

She folded her shopping list and stuck it into her pocket, locked up her apartment, and went upstairs to wait in Eric's apartment until he was finished helping the new members get their jobs. She could only hope that Peter ended up scrubbing toilets or something else equally unpleasant, but she knew that it was unlikely since he’d been ranked fifth. 

Eric came in about an hour later, and he looked overly frustrated. "Hey," he greeted her as soon as he saw her, and his face brightened at once. "I would have thought that you would be getting settled into your new apartment. I was going to go down and find you; I got the unit number from Peggy."

"I moved all of my things in already," Tris said. "But as I was thinking of some of the things that I would need, I saw a red light in the corner of the bathroom mirror. I pried it off the wall and discovered-"

"That it was a one-way mirror and that there was a camera behind it?" Eric finished, and Tris nodded with agreement. "At least you realized it right away, although, they're probably on to you now. Not to say that they probably weren’t already on to you when you started to hang around me. Which brings me to my second point: somebody is waiting for us. We should go now."

"What, who?" Tris asked as she got up.

"It's a surprise," Eric said with a coy smile. Tris followed Eric down to the Pit, and then was more than a little surprised when he lead her over to the stairs that would take them down to the river. He jumped down onto the rocks and then turned around to help her get down. 

Then, they started to pick their way from rock to rock, along the side of the stairs. When they went under the Pit, Eric pulled a bright flashlight out from his pocket and used it to light their way. "Be careful," he said. He didn't have to tell her that twice. One false step over the rocks, which were slick with water and algae, and Tris would plummet into the river. If she didn’t drown, then the current would likely bash her against the rocks until she was dead.

Tris wanted to ask where they were going, but figured that they were currently being watched. By the Watchers. This was suspicious behavior, after all, and it would surely raise some red flags for them. 

"How much further?" Tris asked after about five minutes. She’d had no idea that the river went this far, but admittedly, she’d honestly never given it much thought. They were surely out from under the Dauntless compound by now. The perimeter of the compound was something that Tris knew super well by now because of having to run it for the past three weeks. 

"Not long now," Eric said. 

After a few more minutes, Eric lead Tris over to a door that was half-hidden behind some rocks. He pulled a key out from his pocket and used it to unlock the door. What was on the other side was something that Tris hadn't been expecting to see.

"Mom!" she exclaimed. Natalie stood up from the chair that she was sitting in and opened her arms for a hug. Tris ran over and embraced her mother. She was glad to see that Natalie was wearing her usual, Abnegation clothing, including long sleeves that completely covered all of the tattoos on her arm. 

"Beatrice, I'm so happy for you," Natalie said as she held her daughter out at arm's length. "What position did you rank?"

"First," Tris said. That's when she realized that the three of them were not alone in the room. There were a couple of people in blue Erudite clothing, a few more in the black and white of Candor, but most there wore the grey of Abnegation. "What is this? Are all of you guys divergent?"

"Yes," Natalie agreed. "I trust that Eric has filled you in on most everything?"

"He has, but I still have a lot of questions," Tris said. 

"I'm sure that you do, because you're naturally curious," Natalie said. "Why don't you take a seat. Everybody, this is my daughter, Beatrice."

"I go by Tris now," she spoke up. 

"Okay," Natalie agreed. They sat down at the table, and Natalie introduced everybody. There were only two people from Erudite who were full members; the rest of them were children. There were more adults from Candor, but it was a mixed bunch in regards to Abnegation. "Were there any other divergents within the batch of initiates this year?" Natalie asked Eric.

"There was some talk about a Dauntless-born named Uriah," Eric said. "But I wasn't in charge of his simulations, and was completely unable to see them without raising suspicions. But now that the initiation period is over and he's a member, I should have access to them."

"What do you mean, 'talk'?" asked a girl from Erudite, Holly. 

"The leaders said that it was oddly suspicious that both computers broke one right after the other. One only 'broke' after Tris was under, and I set it on fire to prevent anybody else from seeing her simulation," Eric said as he shot Tris an annoyed look. She offered him a sheepish smile. "The other was the day before, with Uriah."

"Four was in charge of the Dauntless-born," Tris said. "Would he cover for the divergents?"

"It's not the first time that he's done something like this before," Eric explained. "We think that he might be divergent, but we have no proof of it. There are two instances of a child's aptitude test being hand-recorded. Yours was the second."

"And Four's was the first?" Tris asked a bit skeptically. "I find it a little fishy that nobody else in the history of using those computers has anybody else ever had a hand-recorded aptitude test entry. Computers break."

"Yes, but we’ve been trying to reach out to those that we think might be divergent and tell them how they should react inside of the simulation in order to not arouse suspicion," said a man from Abnegation, Michael. "There’s a reason why Abnegation is the largest faction, and it’s not just all of the drop-outs from the other factions. And also why so many people join us every year." 

Not for the first time, Tris recalled Tori's warning to join Abnegation. "You suspected that I might be divergent, but you didn't warn me?" Tris asked her mom.

"I had no idea," Natalie said gently. "I had hoped that you would be, but when it turned out that Caleb wasn't, I had started to pray that you weren't as well. It's something that I both wanted for you but feared for you. For many reasons."

"I suppose that I understand, but maybe you should have warned me at any rate. Just in case."

"Yes," Natalie agreed with a resigned sigh. "But I told Caleb what to be on the lookout for in case he was a divergent, but he went around and told Jeanine about my warning as soon as he joined the faction."

"Why would he betray us like that?" Tris asked with a wounded look.

"I don't think that he realized what he was doing," Natalie said gently. "Things have been bad for divergents, but Jeanine has started to crack down on us in Abnegation. Caleb has been trying to help us out by being a double-agent. Unlike Eric, who was sent into Dauntless by Jeanine, Caleb is on the inside. The inside-inside, unlike Holly, Carol, Jessica, Paul, and Jason, who are only just children."

"Moving forward," said Holly. "Eric, look into this guy that you think might be divergent. And, as always, try to keep an eye out for Tobias's divergence."

"Tobias?" Tris asked with some surprise.

"That's Four's real name," Eric explained. "He only changed it because he apparently has four fears."

"One of them is Marcus," Natalie said with a depressed sigh.

"Marcus Eaton? Why is he afraid of Marcus?" Tris asked with even more surprise. 

"Tobias is Marcus's son," Natalie said. "You might remember him when his mother died. I think that you were maybe seven?"

"No, I don't remember," Tris said after she thought about it for a moment. 

"It doesn't really matter," Eric said quickly. "Why Four wanted to leave Abnegation is his own business, as annoying as he might be to me. But, we don't really work much together except for this one time of the year."

"But now, new business," Holly interrupted. Even though Eric had told Tris that her mother was in charge of the group, it was obviously the kids from Erudite who made sure that things ran smoothly. "Has anybody had any encounters with the Watchers since the last meeting?"

"Tris found a camera in her new apartment," Eric said.

"If it's a new apartment, that's to be expected," Jason said dismissively. "It's probably been there since the building went up."

"Yes, probably," Natalie agreed. "But the rest of you?"

"No, the electronic blocker has been working well," Michael agreed. “Sharon was a bit skeptical about using the generator at first, but your lie about wanting to conserve energy for those who can’t always afford it worked like a charm, Natalie.”

"And no problems with any of the solar generators?" Eric asked. 

"It's a little difficult to get started sometimes, but I think that it's an error on my end," Mary, a lady from Abnegation, spoke up. "How is the work coming on the new prototype?"

"Slowly," Holly said with some annoyance. "Jeanine has been closely watching what's going on in the labs."

"I keep telling you guys that all I need is some materials of my own and I'd be able to work on it," Eric said. 

"And I keep telling you that Jeanine-" Holly started, but Eric cut her off.

"Yeah yeah, literally all of our problems eventually boils down to Jeanine and her determination to kill all of us," Eric said with a sneer. 

"But I have a housewarming present for you, Tris," Paul said. He pulled something out from a bag at his feet, and slid one of the devices that Eric had shown her the other week across the table to her. "Better than a house plant that you'll probably kill."

"But what about a generator?" Tris asked.

"Those are a little bit harder to get around so easily," Eric explained. 

"We should have one to you by the end of the week," Holly said. "So either learn how to deal without the lights or not to talk about stuff."

"Okay, so who exactly are these Watchers?"

"They are people who live outside of the city," Natalie said slowly. "The entire city is nothing but a giant social experiment to see how far that they could emotionally push people."

"What? Why would anybody want to do something like that?" Tris asked with a look of pure disgust on her face.

"I can't tell you why they started, but the only reason why we're inside of the experiment now is to be entertainment for people who live outside," Natalie said. 

"Why?" Tris asked with growing outrage. 

"Again, I can't tell you that, because I don't know," Natalie said. "But the Watchers are the ones who, well, watch the footage. And they take all of it and turn it into a TV series, which is then shown to the public."

"And all without our knowledge," Michael said with a sneer. 

"Okay, but what role in the experiment do divergents play? Surely the Watchers are aware that we're aware of them,” Tris said.

"Is there any other business?" Natalie said instead of giving an answer. 

"No," some of the others said slowly. 

"Then that will conclude the meeting for this week. We'll meet again next week as usual, unless something comes up before then." The others started to gather their things. A couple of them congratulated Tris for becoming a Dauntless member on their way out from the multiple doors that lined the room. 

When the only people in the room were Tris, Natalie, and Eric, Eric turned to Natalie and asked, "Do you want me to leave?" 

"Something tells me that anything that I tell Tris, she'll only just turn around and tell you anyway," Natalie said with a knowing smile. "You might as well stay. Something that I don't want to tell anybody else is about why I know all about the Watchers and the things that are going on outside of the city."

"And nobody else has wondered why?" Tris asked with a frown.

"Well, yes. Especially those from Erudite, because they're all very curious people. But I've always managed to evade the question until now. And they value my advice and all of the things that I've done for them too much to press the issue," Natalie explained. "The thing is that I was not born here, inside of the city and as a part of the faction system, but rather, outside. The problem with people killing divergents was getting very bad, and when it was discovered that I was also divergent, they decided to plant me into the city so that I could work to help fix the situation."

"Okay, but what exactly are divergents?" Tris asked. “There’s got to be more to them than people who are aware in a simulation.”

"That seems like a conversation for another day," Natalie said with a resigned sigh. "The two of you have to get back into the compound before you're missed."

"We should," Eric said. "If you don't mind..." He held out his hand to Tris, and she handed him the device that she'd been given. Eric put it into his jacket pocket, which were much larger than any of Tris’s pockets.

"And you promised to take me furniture shopping," Tris said with a sneer as they got up to leave.

"We can go as soon as you drop that off at your apartment," Eric said. Natalie came over to offer her daughter another hug. 

"I was really afraid for you, honey, but I'm happy that you're doing well now," she said before she went to hug Eric. Tris saw that Natalie whispered something in his ear, which made him blanch. Natalie laughed. "I'll see you guys next week." 

Eric and Tris left the room and started to pick their way back along the river to the Dauntless compound. "What did she say to you?" Tris asked after a moment. 

"She said that if I hurt you, she'd hurt me. Did you tell her about our relationship?"

"When would I have? This is only the second time that I've seen her since I joined Dauntless," Tris said. "The first time that I saw her, I had no idea that you liked me. And I was more confused by literally everything that was happening to even begin to tell her about any sort of relationship that I had. And you were with me the entire time just now."

"Hey, there are ways to get messages to people here," Eric protested. "But at the same time, now that I think about it, I never told you about any of them, so how could you have?"

"She is my mother," Tris said as she gave him a dry look. "Maybe it's just mother's intuition?"

When Tris and Eric climbed back up to the Pit, they immediately went up to Tris's apartment to drop off the device. "That couch though," Tris said as she motioned the worn-down sofa. 

"You see what I mean?" Eric said.

"Not like I didn't believe you," Tris said with a sneer. "I just don't want to sit on... that." She motioned towards the lumpy bits, the parts that were stained with an unknown substance, as well as the two springs that stuck out from it.

"It might be a day or two before you can get the furniture in, since they're not made here," Eric said. 

"I have a bunch of other stuff that I need, too," Tris said as she pulled the list out from her pocket. Eric took it from her and looked at it. 

"We can get a bunch of this stuff at the grocery store, but I'm a little worried about your funds. You should prioritize what you need right now verses what can wait until you get your first paycheck."

"Right," Tris said slowly as she found the pad of paper in the drawer again and started to rewrite her list in order of the things that she needed right now. "Hey," she said after a moment of writing. She looked up at Eric. "Do you think that it's weird that our society treats sixteen year olds like adults? I don't feel like I’m an adult."

"I'm two years older than you, and I'm not quite sure that I feel more of an adult than when I became a full-fledged Dauntless," Eric said. "But I guess that this is the way that things have always been done. We just find ways to deal with it and get used to it." He grabbed her arm and pulled her around the counter. "But hey, you're an adult now." He gently cupped her face and kissed her. "You can do whatever you want. Your mother threatened me bodily harm if I ever hurt you. We could at least pretend like we're in an adult relationship."

"I don't like that phrase, 'adult relationship," Tris said as she wrinkled her nose. "It makes me a little uneasy."

"I don't want to push you into doing anything that you don't want to do," Eric reassured her as he kissed her again. 

“And we're not pretending to be in a relationship, we actually are in one," Tris said with confusion. Eric offered her a big smile. 

"You have no idea how happy it makes me to hear you say that," he said. He kissed her again before he turned to the counter to pick up Tris's new shopping list. "Let's go then."

 

* * *

"Tris! Tris!" somebody called out. Tris and Eric turned around as Christina ran towards them. Will stood at the end of the isle. "I was really hoping to run into you in town. I don't know where you live now, and I can't come and bother you in your new apartment!"

"We'll have to have a party to celebrate the fact that we're now full members," Tris said. "I've roped Eric into helping me shop for the things that I need. I ordered a new sofa and mattress, but they're going to take three days to arrive."

Christina pulled Tris a bit away from where Eric stood. "Oh my god," Christina hissed in Tris's ear. "Eric?! Are you serious? I thought that Peter was just blowing smoke because he was angry that you'd beaten him in stage two. But now you're telling me that you're actually with him?"

"Would you at least wait for me to explain?" Tris said with irritation. Christina put her hands on her hips and gave Tris a dry look. Tris looked past her friend over to where Eric stood with Will. 

"Well? I'm waiting," Christina said with irritation.

"It's a long story," Tris said. "Why don't you come by my apartment later and I can tell you all about it." Tris gave her friend her new address. 

"Oh my god!" Christina mouthed as Tris turned to go back to Eric. He offered Tris a knowing smirk. 

"Are you going to leave me to go... do whatever it is that girls do when they aren't around us men?" he asked her. 

She shook her head. "No, I told her to come by my apartment later."

"Oh I see. Later. When neither of us are around,” he said as he motioned between himself and Will. Will didn’t seem to have heard what Eric had just said, however.

"See you later," Will said as he dragged Christina from the isle. 

"Oh my god!" Christina mouthed again as she looked back to Tris and Eric. 

Eric chuckled and shook his head. "These people are going to be my new friends now, aren't they?"

"Hey, I'm sure that you have friends, too," Tris pointed out. She recalled the night when she'd run into Eric by the Chasm with his friends. 

"I do," Eric agreed. "You'd probably like them a lot more than those two."

"Hey hey now, I think that it's all very subjective. I think that Christina and I really bonded because we were the only girls who were against Peter."

"Only girls? What about what's her name?" He snapped his fingers a few times as he tried to recall the name.

"Myra?"

"Yes, her."

"I honestly didn't think that she really cared all that much," Tris said. "I honestly have no idea why she even came to Dauntless."

"Because of Edward," Eric said as if it was the most obvious thing in the entire world.

"Yes, but she's barely sixteen," Tris pointed out. "Was she seriously going to throw her entire life away just to follow some guy that she liked?"

"What's wrong with doing something for somebody that you like?"

"I get wanting to do something nice for them, like to maybe put on some make up or something, but to join a faction?" Tris said with a raised eyebrow. "I think that we both know that she wouldn't have made the cut. If Peter hadn't stabbed Edward in the eye, do you think that he would have left the faction to join her? Or would that have been the end of their relationship?"

"You have a very valid point," Eric said with a slight nod. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, please let me know if you spotted any grammatical errors or typos so that I can fix them.
> 
> And if you're enjoying this, please, take a few seconds to write out a review or to leave kudos. It means so much to me to the people who have already done so.


	10. Chapter 10

“Yeah yeah, I’m coming,” Tris said as she walked to the front door. She opened it and Christina offered her a giant grin and waved a bottle in Tris’s face.

“I don’t know what this is, but Zeke said that it’ll put us on our backs,” Christina said as Tris gestured for her friend to come inside. “Woooow, this is a lot nicer than my apartment.”

“It’s okay,” Tris said. “I don’t have any chairs and that sofa is really gross, so let’s just sit on the floor. Are you sure that we want to be ‘on our backs’?”

“Hell yeah, we need to celebrate!” Christina said as she plopped down on the floor in front of the sofa. She popped the cap off on the bottle, took a swig, and turned to Tris. “Okay, so spill. Everything about you and Eric. When did all of this start?” 

Tris told Christina about how Eric had come to her in the hospital to offer to train her. She left out the parts about their divergence, and about how he’d helped her with the simulations, too. But she did tell Christina about how it had been Eric who’d saved her from being raped and killed by Peter, Drew, and Al, and how she’d spent the last week sleeping in his bed instead of in the dorm.

“But nothing happened until yesterday, I swear,” Tris finished. “Eric always slept on the sofa. It wasn’t even a question with him. Yesterday, after I left the dining hall, he kissed me.” Christina let out an excited, high-pitched noise. “We shared his bed last night, but sleep was the only thing that we did.” Christina made the same noise again. 

“What was it like? Will and I have only just kissed and held hands,” Christina said.

“Kind of awkward,” Tris said after a moment. “I kept trying to turn over in the night, but his arm was around my waist, and it would wake me up. I liked it, but I suppose that it would just be something that I’d have to get used to. However, I’m glad that I have my own space because I felt so bad about putting him out of his bed. I’ll be happy to get to sleep tonight without fearing for my life or feeling bad about Eric.”

“How did you know that you liked him?” Christina asked. 

“Probably around the time that I started to realize that there was a lot more to him than just the hard-ass initiate instructor?” Tris said with some hesitation.

“Arg, that’s not what I meant, but helpful,” Christina said with a frustrated groan. “How did you know that you like-liked him?” Tris’s face flushed as she recalled the conversation that she’d had with him the other day about Michelle. “Oh my gosh, look at you! How awesome is this, though? We’ve both found somebody, and we’re moving up in the world.”

“What job did you pick?” Tris asked, grateful to have been given an out from the awkward question. 

“There wasn’t much left by the time that it was my turn. It was an option between street officer and sitting around and watching the cameras all day long. I picked to be an officer. I figured that, at the least, it would get me outside for a bit. But you should have seen the sour look on Peter’s face when he came out from his meeting. I guess that you took away his job plans?”

“Eric talked me into it,” Tris said. “But I’m not going to become a leader unless two people die.”

“That’s not that bad. Plus, you’ll get to work with Eric.”

“It’s either going to be a really great idea or it’ll be a nail in the coffin of our relationship,” Tris said.

“No,” Christina said. She set the half-drunk bottle down on the floor between them so that she could put her hands on either side of her friend’s face. “No. You and Eric will not break up. Ever. I don’t see the nicer side of him yet, but I know that I want for you to be happy. Do I have to threaten him for you? That’s what friends do, right?”

“I suppose,” Tris said slowly. She was a little sad that she couldn’t tell her friend about how her mom had already threatened him, just hours earlier. 

The two of them sat and talked about everything that came to mind as they progressively got drunker and drunker off of the liquor that Zeke had given to Christina. Sometime around 3 AM, they fell asleep in the middle of Tris’s living room.

That was how Eric found them the next morning. “Do I want to know what happened here?” he asked as after he’d turned the light on and found them curled up around one another.

“Oh god, you broke into Tris’s apartment?!” Christina whined as she pressed her face against Tris’s arm to block out the light. 

“No, I gave him my spare key yesterday,” Tris explained as she threw her other arm over her face. 

“Please don’t tell me that you drank this by yourselves,” Eric said as he picked up the empty bottle from where it had rolled into the kitchenette. 

“Why are you yelling?” Christina complained as she rolled over so that she was face-first in the carpet. 

“Christina drank most of it,” Tris said. “I had some, but it was too much.”

“Yes, I can tell,” Eric said with a coy smirk. “But I need you awake and sober and cleaned up for your first day of leadership training.”

“Oh shit!” Tris said as she sat up. “Ow, my head.” 

Eric tsked as he walked over to her and helped her to her feet. “Welcome to adulthood, where hangovers are a thing that exists. Get into the shower, and I’ll make sure that Christina gets back to her own bed. Or a close approximation thereof.”

After a shower, Tris felt a lot better. Putting on some fresh clothes made her start to feel like herself again. She walked out from her bedroom and Eric handed her a cup of coffee. “Come on, you can drink it on the way,” Eric said. “I didn’t exactly intend to have to deal with this right now, so we’re running a little bit late.”

“I’m sorry,” Tris said as she quickly locked up her apartment. 

“It’s okay,” Eric said as they got onto the elevator. “I can forgive you because I know that it was probably all Christina’s idea. Is there something that I ought to be worried about, though?”

“We just talked for a while and then fell asleep,” Tris said. “I didn’t feel as weird sleeping on the floor because Christina was there.”

“And you had to get drunk in order to do that?” Eric asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Oh yes,” Tris said with all seriousness. “If we weren’t drunk, then it would have been silly to sleep on the floor.” 

“You could always sleep with me until your bed arrives,” Eric said as the elevator came to a stop. 

“Thanks, but the floor is okay for the next two nights,” Tris said.

“Wait until your back starts to hurt today after having spent the night on the floor; you might change your mind then,” Eric said with a mischievous glint in his eyes. 

They walked across the compound to the security room, where there were rows and rows of monitors that showed live-feeds of the city. “Welcome to the monitoring room,” Eric said as they walked in. “This is where we’re able to keep an eye out for any sort of trouble anywhere in public spaces.” They walked along behind the workers in their seats. 

“Hey, Tris,” Four said from in front of one row of monitors. All of them were pointed to a park in the Abnegation section of the city. “I hear that you’re going to be the new head honcho around here.”

“Going to be is the key phrase there,” Tris said before she took a big gulp of her coffee. Four sniffed at the air, and then looked at Tris. 

“Are you… are you drunk?”

“No,” Tris said quickly with venom. 

“She was last night,” Eric said with a smirk. “Not like it’s any of your business.”

“No, you’re right. It’s not my business if a leader in training shows up drunk for work,” Four said sarcastically. 

“Hey, I’m not drunk anymore!” Tris protested and flashed him an irritated look.

“Right, because being hung over is so much better,” Four said. He stood up and gestured at the chair that he’d just vacated. “Well, take a seat and I’ll show you how to work the cameras.” Tris handed Eric her coffee mug and sat down. 

Tris sat patiently and listened as Four showed her how to move the cameras back and forth and to zoom in. Then, she ran through some basic directions that Four gave her after he’d finished his lesson. 

“There isn’t really all that much to being in the security room,” Four finished. “Not a lot happens; you always hear about it later. About how something happened just after your shift ended.”

“What sort of things are you searching for?” Tris asked.

“Suspicious behavior,” Four said. “People who look like they don’t belong. See these people right there?” He pointed to some children who’d come to the park with their parents within the past five minutes. “These people are not suspicious. They’re from Abnegation; they belong in that section of town. They look happy, and they’re engaging with the others around them.” Tris nodded with understanding. “What you need to be on the lookout for are people who are sort of… What’s the word?”

“Walking funny?” Eric supplied. “People who wear trench coats or knit caps in the middle of summer. People who’re loitering around an area for much too long.”

“Right,” Four said with a slight nod of his head. “Basically, if you think that it’s suspicious, it probably is. Trust your gut.”

“And now, over to the radios,” Eric said. Four gestured to a two-way radio that was set into the side of the bank of monitors at his station. 

“All of the people on patrol have radios that are tuned into this frequency,” Four explained. “All of the cameras list their locations down in the bottom here.” He pointed to the bottom corner of one of the monitors, and Tris saw that it said “Sunrise Park, West Corner”. “Part of the training for the patrol officers is to memorize the entire city. All of the street names, the names of all of the buildings, all of the parks and the neighborhoods.”

“So that if we radio them to tell them that there’s an issue in Sunrise Park, they instantly know where that is? Even if they’re not from Abnegation originally?” Tris asked.

“Yes, that’s right,” Four said with a slight nod of his head.

“Let’s go find a patrol office to talk to,” Eric said. He steered Tris away from Four’s station, and, after a while, he pointed to some officers who were standing around some building in Erudite’s section of town. 

“Sorry, do you mind if we borrow your radio for a second?” Eric asked the guy who was sitting at that station.

“Go ahead,” the guy said as he gestured to it. 

Eric picked up the receiver and handed it to Tris. “Press the button on the side to talk.”

“Officers stand in front of the Songbird Building,” Tris said into the radio as she read the name off from the monitor. She watched as they snapped to attention. One of them reached for his radio.

“Yes, where do you need us?” came his staticy reply. 

“No, I don’t need you anywhere,” Tris explained. “I’m in training.”

“Ah, a newbie security room person,” the guard said.

“No, leader-in-training,” Tris said. 

“Ah, well, good luck with your training, then,” the other guard said. 

“Thank you. I’ll let you get back to your patrolling now,” Tris said before she hung the radio back up. She turned to Eric.

“And… that’s pretty much everything that you need to know about the monitor room,” Eric said. He put his arm around Tris’s shoulders and led her out from the room.

As they left, Tris looked over her shoulder and realized that Four was watching them intently. She took a sip of her coffee and then turned to Eric. “Four is watching us,” she said.

“Is he watching us? Or just you?” Eric replied.

“He’s your friend,” Tris pointed out, but Eric gave a derisive snort.

“He is not my friend,” he said with annoyance. Tris shook her head slightly.

“But why would he be watching me?”

“We told you yesterday that he was from Abnegation, right?” Eric asked.

“Yes,” Tris said. “He was Marcus’s son.”

“So you know Marcus?” 

“Yes, of course,” Tris said with some annoyance. “If you weren’t the leader here, do you think that you would know the names of the Dauntless leaders?”

“Okay, point,” Eric said with a smirk. “But I don’t exactly pay attention to who’s in charge of the other factions. I brush up on their names every time that I have to go and interaction with them, but that’s about it.”

“You’re so horrible,” Tris said with a laugh.

“Save the names for after I’ve had you in the filing room all day, which is where we’re going next.”

“Filing?” Tris asked with some surprise. “I didn’t think that there would be any paper files here anymore. We rely so much on computers now.”

“Yes, but somebody in the past was either overly paranoid, overly redundant, or both. We have paper files for everything, and now, you’re going to learn how to file everything properly.” Eric offered Tris a bright smile, and she let out a groan of annoyance. 

 

* * *

“And that concludes my presentation,” April finished. “And questions?” And Tris had thought that being stuck in the filing room all day was dreadfully boring; she had yet to sit in on a monthly meeting and listen to April talk about litter for the past half hour. 

But still, Tris raised her hand and began speaking when the older leader nodded at her. “Having been from Abnegation, I can almost assure you that most of the litter in the streets is caused by the Dauntless patrols in the first place,” Tris said. “I like the thought of the patrol officers picking up litter off of the streets, don’t get me wrong. But I think that you’re making things way more complicated than they actually have to be.” Across the table, Ken glared at Tris.

“Then what exactly would you propose that we do?” April asked. She either ignored Ken or just didn’t see the look that he was giving the girl. “We’ve already got rules in place about not littering, but they do it anyway, regardless of what we tell them.”

“If they’re not obeying the rules, then it’s probably time to get stricter about them,” Tris pointed out. “Threaten to send them to the less-enjoyed routes, or, if they’re already patrolling that area, then demote them and have them start patrolling the wall instead. If the littering in the city has gotten to the point where the other factions are complaining about it, we know that something’s got to be done. And the root cause of the problem is the Dauntless patrols.”

April nodded with agreement. “She does have a point,” she said. 

“And how exactly do you know that it’s the patrol officers who are leaving garbage all over town?” Max asked. 

“Because when I was still in Abnegation, part of the cycle of volunteer work was to go around the city and pick up litter,” Tris explained. “There was always so much stuff even in Abnegation’s part of town. We would never litter, because it’s ugly and selfish to do so. The only other people who routinely passed through that part of town were the patrol officers. Maybe you should go talk to the people who work in the monitor room, and ask them about the amount of littering that they see.”

“That is another point,” Jeremy agreed.

“So, are we all in agreement, then?” April asked as she looked around at the six other people in the room. “We’re going to talk to the people in the monitor room and start to implement harsher punishments for patrol officers who drop litter?”

“Aye,” everybody said almost in unison. Ken’s sour look still did not go away and he only looked away from Tris when Eric stood up to present his business for the month. 

“As all of you already know, Erudite has been working with Dauntless as long as anybody can remember in order to, not only develop the simulation serum that we use for our training, but they also strive to make it better. There were three incidents with the serum this year: two within days of one another during our own training, and one while the aptitude tests were being given to the children,” Eric started.

He caught Tris’s eye, and she looked down at her notes quickly. Two of those incidents had been caused by her, and the other she already knew had been caused by Uriah. She knew that her own incidents had been the result of people helping to cover up her own divergence, and the fault lay only in Eric and Tori for destroying the computers, not the serum. Neither she nor Eric could say for certain if the computer having been broken was a result of Four destroying the computer to help cover up Uriah’s own divergence or if it was just a coincidence. But the fact remained that three computers had broken while using the serum; it was some sort of record, according to what Eric had told Tris.

“Of course, the Erudite are working almost non-stop to make the serum better, but hearing about three broken computers was worrying to Jeanine,” Eric went on. “She believes that she might be onto something, and is requesting to move ahead with the testing phase.”

“How many does that lady want now?” April asked with some irritation. 

“I’m just curious why it is that she can’t do the initial testing on her own faction members,” Ken said with equal irritation.

“The Erudite members aren’t used to being in the simulations,” Max pointed out.

“You’d think that they would be, or at least learn, considering that they’re the ones who make it,” April snapped at him. 

“Those are my thoughts exactly,” Steve said. “They grab our members for every step of testing, and can’t be bothered to do it on themselves.” The others all hummed with agreement, except for Max, who only frowned.

“If they tested the serum on themselves, who would run the tests on the outside?” Max asked.

“Regardless of our opinion on the matter, this is what they’re asking for,” Eric said to cut off any more arguments. “If we have any issues with the way that they’re using our members for testing, then we can bring it up with them at the next quarterly meeting.”

“Damned straight I will,” April said as she typed something out on her tablet. Presumably a note to bring the subject up at the quarterly meeting next month. 

“Moving along, should we institute a draft to come up with people, or should we do this strictly by a volunteer basis this time around?” Eric went on.

Tris thought about the divergents who might be hiding in Dauntless. If Eric was in charge of drawing names for the draft, then he would be able to not pick Uriah, Four, or any of the others for it. “Draft,” she voted. 

Everybody else voted for volunteer. “Let them decide if they want to do it or not,” April pointed out. Tris could only hope that the divergents were smart enough to stay away from Erudite and the testing of the newest serum. 

Eric sat back down again. As Ken stood up to present his business, Eric reached over and grasped the hand that Tris had resting on her lap. He offered it a reassuring squeeze, even though his attention was focused on Ken.

If the divergents had been smart enough to survive in Dauntless for this long, then they would continue to survive. 

 

* * *

Immediately following the leader meeting, Eric had to go to a meeting with some of the other Dauntless members, so Tris didn’t even see him until dinner time. “I need to talk to you about something,” Tris said as he sat down next to her at a long table in the dining hall.

“Is it about the meeting today?” Eric asked. Tris gave a slight nod of her head. “Then we’ll talk about it later, okay?” Good, he knew exactly what she wanted to talk about.

“What meeting?” Christina asked as she looked between the two of them with some confusion.

“The Dauntless leaders had a meeting today,” Tris explained. “It was deadly.”

Christina pulled a face, and then asked, “Is there anything that we should be worried about?”

“Only if you litter while on patrol,” Eric said as he glared at her.

“Hey, I pick up after myself,” Christina protested.

“Most of the things that were discussed won’t affect most people,” Tris said.

“Well, anyway, you should have seen the scuffle in front of the courthouse today,” Will said in an attempt to change the subject when it became obvious that neither Tris nor Eric were going to offer up any more information on the topic.

 

* * *

As soon as Tris and Eric were done with their meals, they walked casually through the halls of Dauntless on their way to their apartment building. “How was the rest of your day? The meetings any less worse?” Tris asked as they walked.

“Hardly,” Eric said with a roll of his eyes. “Having to listen to Karen rant about how so-and-so shorted the tattoo parlor on indigo ink made April’s presentation on picking up litter seem like Shakespeare.”

The elevator doors slid open and the two of them fell silent as they waited for the couple in the elevator already to get off and leave the apartment building. Eric pressed the button for his floor once they got on, and then he looked down at Tris from the corner of his eye as they elevator started to move.

“And you? Get any new paper cuts working with the files?”

“Yes,” Tris said and held up her hand. On the webbing between her index finger and thumb there was a bright, new paper cut.

“You poor thing,” Eric said with a hint of sarcasm. He grabbed Tris’s hand and pressed his lips to the tiny injury. 

Tris felt her face heat up, and looked away from Eric, even though she didn’t pull her hand away. She still struggled to come to grips with the fact that things were very different in Dauntless, and that there was somebody out there who wanted to kiss all of her little injuries.

Eric pulled his lips away from her hand, but he didn’t release it. Instead, he let it drop down to their sides and he laced their fingers together. Tris looked down at their hands, and then up at Eric. This was the kind of little gesture that she’d sort of expected from being in a relationship. Just, more in the privacy behind closed doors. 

Although, Tris supposed that they were alone in the elevator right now. 

The elevator came to a stop, the doors slid open, and they walked down the hall to Eric’s unit. He had to let go of her hand in order to fish his keys out from his pocket, but once he’d gotten the door unlocked, he pulled her inside. 

“Okay, please tell me that you have a plan to protect the divergents,” Tris said as soon as he’d shut the door behind them.

“Most of them try not to put their necks on the line in that way,” Eric said. “But I am worried about Uriah. Max seems to be overly aware that I’m curious to see his recorded simulations.” Eric started to pace in front of the sofa. 

“I thought that you said to my mom in the meeting the other day that you’d be able to see them now that the initiation period was over,” Tris said as she looked up at him from her seat.

“I should be, but Max hasn’t made them available,” Eric said with a scowl. “I could try to get around him by saying that I’m going to start training you, and that I want to start off by showing you the simulations of the people that you know first. But he might not go for it, because there are thousands of other previously recorded simulations, even from the version of the serum that you used for your own training.”

“Okay, but what are we going to do about him in the meantime?” Tris asked.

“If he puts his name on the sign-up list, then I’ll just erase it,” Eric said. “We go to the volunteers on an individual basis, so he won’t think anything of it if nobody ever comes to get him. He might just thing that we had all of the volunteers that we needed or something. It doesn’t matter what he thinks; he’s not exactly going to complain because he didn’t get a chance to go through some experimental serum testing.”

“Do you think that this is a trap for divergents?”

“Yes and no,” Eric said as he ran a hand through his hair. He plopped down on the sofa, much to Tris’s relief. She was getting dizzy watching him pace. “She really does have an interest in testing a new fear serum, but she also has the hidden agenda of watching for divergents. Despite the fact that we keep assuring her that we don’t have any, she still thinks that we’re hiding them.”

“She knows that a lot of them are hiding in Abnegation, though,” Tris said.

“Yes, but you already knew that,” Eric agreed. 

“I’ve suspected since they started putting out increasingly nastier and nastier ‘reports’,” Tris said, and made air-quotes around the last word. “What I don’t understand is her end game in doing so.”

“I think that she’s hoping to provoke them into attacking.”

“Then she fails to understand how Abnegation works.”

“Yes,” Eric agreed quickly. “Everybody knows that. I’m just speculating here.”

“But what other purpose could she have for pushing them out? I mean, did you see the one about my father?” Tris asked. 

“People don’t believe them,” Eric said to her gently. 

“But that’s my point! People do! They view Erudite as the intelligent faction, so anything that they say must be true!” Tris said, her voice rising several octaves with her irritation and frustration. 

“Calm down, okay?” Eric said gently as he took her hands between his. “I don’t believe them, and I know that none of the other divergents believe them, either. They see Jeanine for what she really is: a monster.” Tris took a deep breath in through her nose and then let it out through her mouth. “Better?” Tris nodded slowly and Eric offered her a smile. “I know that she’s upsetting, but try not to let her get to you, okay? We’re going to have to go to Erudite with the first batch of volunteers in a week. I want you to come to at least some of the meetings so that you can see what to expect. You’ll be expected to, at any rate, since all of the leaders will escort a group as long as the testing is going on.”

“I’m honestly a little nervous about meeting her,” Tris whispered after a moment. “What if she can tell that I’m a divergent?”

“Don’t be,” Eric said as he ran his knuckles gently across her cheek. “She’s only human, after all. Granted, she’s a very commanding person. She’s highly intelligent— probably one of the most intelligent people in the entire city. She knows this, and she lords it over everybody. It’s what makes her powerful. But you wanna know something?”

“What?”

“You’re very bright, too. And she has less power over those who are smarter.”

“Tori said that I fell into all four factions,” Tris said after a beat of silence. “And I could have just as easily picked Erudite over any of the other factions.”

“That’s what being divergent is, Tris,” Eric reminded her. “You aren’t easily pigeon-holed into narrow categories. Who’s to say that you can’t be brave, intelligent, selfless, and honest, all at the same time?”

“What happened during your aptitude test?” Tris asked.

“They change the simulation every time they change the serum, so it’s different from year-to-year. I don’t know what happened in your test, but mine took place on the top of a sky scraper. A man stood on the ledge of the building, about ready to jump to his death. There was no rescue crew that would set up an air bag under him for if he did jump; the only thing that would prevent him from jumping to his death— or not— was whoever was having the simulation.” Eric pulled a face. “And I’m certain that there were plenty of people who picked Dauntless who let the man jump to his death. They can be an exceptionally cruel lot, as I’m sure that you know.”

“Peter would have let him jump,” Tris said with a scowl.

“Peter would have walked up and pushed him off,” Eric said. Tris nodded with agreement. “I asked the man why he wanted to kill himself. ‘Nobody likes me.’ ‘I like you.’ ‘You don’t know me.’ ‘This is true, but if you’ll let me, I’d like to get to know you.’ He still wanted to jump, and was about to, so I rushed to the edge of the building in order to grab him back from the ledge. I tackled him onto the ground, and then he pulled out this knife and threatened to slit his wrists instead. I wrestled the knife away from him and told him that killing himself was a permanently solution to a temporary problem. My test ended then. The person who was giving me my test, it was a lady from Candor. She didn’t tell me what I’d scored, and only just took me straight to Erudite to report my divergence to Jeanine. Jeanine said that she should kill me, but that she wouldn’t. She wanted to have spies in the factions in order to flush out the divergents, so she told me to pick Dauntless.”

“What about the other factions, though? Does she have spies in them as well?”

“I don’t know,” Eric said. “The other Allegiants try to keep a close eye on the transfers into their faction from Erudite, but it’s hard to say if they just picked one of the other factions because they felt more suited to it or not. And they can’t exactly say anything if the transfers from Erudite actually are spies.”

“I’m sure that you aren’t the only one,” Tris said with a slight shake of her head.

“I’m sure that you’re right,” Eric agreed quickly. 

“But how did my mom find you?”

“Jeanine isn’t the only one with spies,” Eric said with a small grin. 

“But we were the only two Dauntless at the meeting,” Tris said slowly, with some confusion. 

“We don’t always go to all of the meetings. Having too many people go missing for a long stretch of time causes suspicion. Some others might come to the next meeting, but we might not go to the one after that.”

“Who are they?” Tris asked eagerly. 

“I’ll introduce you to them sometime,” Eric said with a grin. 

“Does my mom-” Tris started, but the rest of what she was about to say was covered by by the sound of overly loud laugher as a group walked down the hall to a unit further in the building. After a moment, the laughter died out, and then they heard a door slam. Tris looked at her watch; it was getting close to nine. She stood. “I should go. I need my beauty rest for all of the filing that I still have to do.”

“You don’t need any, but I’ll let you go,” Eric said as he stood as well. He pulled Tris to him and offered her a light but lingering kiss. “Night. I’ll see you in the morning.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, please let me know if you spotted any grammatical errors or typos so that I might fix them.
> 
> And, if you're enjoying this, please take a few seconds to let me know in a review or kudos. I appreciate all of the kudos that have already been left.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so two things:
> 
> 1) This will probably be the last update until August (of this year). This is because, while I enjoy writing fanfiction, I really need to focus on some of my original works. And with Camp Nanowrimo starting on Wednesday, I'm going to put everything else on hold while I do that. I hope that you guys can understand. It's just a month.
> 
> 2) Let's play a little game of "spot the Suicide Squad reference", shall we? It's mostly for those of you who follow Jai Courtney's work.

Tris stared at the screens in front of her without really understanding what it was that she was looking at. Meaningless numbers and codes flashed briefly in bright colors before they faded away. Caleb, who sat before one of the monitors, probably understood what every little semi-colon in the code meant, but to Tris, it was nothing but gibberish. 

Eric had reassured her yesterday afternoon when he said that they would be taking the trip to Erudite with the first batch of volunteers that she didn’t have to understand what she was looking at. That it was the job of Erudite. All she had to do was to stand around and make sure that the Dauntless members got back to their homes safely after undergoing the experimental fear serum. 

He’d reassured her when he’d first told her. He’d reassured her at dinner. He’d reassured her that evening. He’d reassured her at breakfast. He’d reassured her on the ride over to Erudite. He’d reassured her in the elevator on their way up to the lab. And the look that he sent Tris over the top of another monitor on the other side of the room spoke nothing but reassurance. But Tris still felt uneasy about the entire thing. 

And it wasn’t just about not understanding what she was looking at. 

“Hm, yes, good,” Jeanine said from behind Tris. Tris jumped a little, because she hadn’t even noticed that the older woman had walked up behind her. “Make note of that for later study, Caleb.” Caleb pressed some keys; the monitor didn’t show that any sort of physical change had happened, but Tris was certain that there was now a virtual bookmark in the stream of code.

“He’s waking up,” Eric said. A second later, the volunteer sat up in the chair, gasping, coughing, and wheezing. Tris had watched the first volunteer’s simulation, but had walked around to see what her brother was looking at for the second.

A lady from Erudite hustled over to the chair and quickly guided the man off to the chairs that sat against the wall where the other three volunteers sat as they waited, either for their turn, or for the rest of the testing to finish. 

“How did you find the simulation in comparison to the other simulations that you have experienced in the past?” another lady asked once the man was seated. She’d gone down a list of questions after the other person had finished his simulation. 

Tris tuned out her overly professional questions and walked around to the monitor that would allow her to see what was happening in the simulation. The code was not that interesting. 

“Enjoying yourself?” Eric whispered to her. 

“Hardly,” Tris replied in an even tone. “I don’t know how you could stand to watch these. It’s so boring.”

Eric laughed in response. “It’s not nearly so boring when you know what you’re looking for.”

“What? It was a train and he was tied to the tracks,” Tris said dryly. “I can’t possibly imagine that it would be a metaphor for anything other than that he was afraid of being run over by an out-of-control train.” Eric gave her a dry look, and Tris guessed that there was a hell of a lot more than literally being run over by a train.

The woman had finished questioning the second volunteer, and was walking the third one over to the chair. The first woman approached with another needle that was full of the serum being tested today.

 

* * *

Tris somehow managed to make it through the other two simulations without completely dying of boredom. “Mr. Coulter, might I have a word with you and Ms. Prior in my office?” Jeanine asked as one of the two women walked the final volunteer over to the chairs against the wall. 

Eric nodded with agreement, and the two of them followed Jeanine out from the lab, down the hall, and into her office. It was a beautifully decorated space with a giant floor-to-ceiling window that looked out over one of the parks in Erudite.

The parks in Erudite were strange to Tris. In Abnegation, they were filled with soft toy equipment for the children to play on and benches for the parents to sit on while their children played. However, the parks in Erudite were simply beautiful, open spaces that were filled with meandering paths so that people could take long, thoughtful walks. There were also plenty of benches so that people could sit and read; Tris saw lots of people who were doing the latter at the moment. 

“We’ve received a lot of very useful data from the testing today,” Jeanine said as she sunk into the chair behind her desk. Eric sat without prompting, and Tris sat with some hesitation on the other chair. “It’s going to take a little bit longer for us to comb through all of it, but the results look very promising.”

“When will we be able to see the results?” Tris asked.

“We will inform you of the progress that we’ve made today at next week’s testing. With a new batch of testers,” Jeanine said evenly as she shot Tris a cold look. 

“Wouldn’t it be easier to have the same testers as today? They know what to expect,” Tris said with some confusion. Eric shot her a warning look out of the corner of his eye.

“And that is exactly why we cannot use the same people as those who came in today,” Jeanine explained. “They know what to expect.”

“But, if that’s your standard for the volunteers, then everybody in Dauntless should be exempt from the testing, because we’ve all undergone the fear serum before,” Tris pointed out. Eric was flat-out glaring at her now.

“Yes, but not this specific batch of serum,” Jeanine explained. “Ms. Prior, would you do us a favor and go wait out in the hall? I’d like a word in private with Mr. Coulter.”

Tris stood up with annoyance. She’d probably crossed some sort of line and now Jeanine was going to rant about her behavior to Eric. She’d probably get into trouble later. Tris wasn’t even sure if it had been worth it.

As she waited out in the hall, another thought occurred to her. Eric was still technically a Dauntless spy for Jeanine, although the Erudite leader didn’t know that Eric was feeding her false information and half-truths. But just because Jeanine had sent her out for an update on what was going on in Dauntless didn’t mean that she couldn’t also talk about Tris.

After about five minutes, Eric and Jeanine came out. “I’ll escort you down,” Jeanine said. “The volunteers have been waiting all this time. They’re probably getting a little anxious to leave.”

Eric only grunted in response. None of the volunteers had the keys to the car that they’d taken to Erudite, so unless they wanted to walk back or jump onto a train, they wouldn’t leave without Tris and Eric. 

They fell silent after that, and the silence made Tris feel exceptionally self-conscious. As they rode the elevator down to the first floor, Tris felt Jeanine’s eyes on her. The older woman was judging her, and it was the worst feeling in the world. 

“Until we meet again, Mr. Coulter, Ms. Prior,” Jeanine said once they reached the front doors of the building. Eric only nodded and opened the door. 

“I’ve never felt like that before,” Tris whispered as they walked away from the building. Their black car was parked a few feet away, and the four volunteers were waiting for them. 

“I warned you about that, didn’t I?” Eric said. He unlocked the driver’s door and unlocked all of the other doors. Tris climbed into the shot-gun seat, and the four other men climbed into the back. It was a tight squeeze, but they’d driven to Erudite, and they would get back to Dauntless. 

 

* * *

When they got back to the Dauntless compound, Eric and Tris went straight to Tris’s apartment. “It feels nice to finally be able to have some sense of privacy in my own apartment,” Tris said as she shut the door behind Eric. 

“But it’s not as nice as mine is,” Eric said. He went over to the worn fridge and looked inside. There wasn’t much inside, only some milk.

“What are you looking for?” Tris asked.

“Cups.”

“I don’t keep them in the fridge. Try the cupboard above the sink,” Tris said. “Of course your apartment is nicer. You’ve had two years to make it better; I’ve had a week. Your apartment is a little bit bigger, too.”

“Want something to drink?” Eric asked after he’d gotten some water from the sink. 

“No, I’m okay,” Tris said as she flopped down on her new sofa. Eric came over and sat down next to her; he put his cup of water down on her coffee table. “What did Jeanine talk to you about when she sent me out from the room?”

“She just wanted an update on what was going on here,” Eric explained. “It’s been a while since I’ve had a moment to be alone with her, so I had a lot to tell her.” He paused for a moment to consider his words. “Well, rather, I had a lot of baloney to tell her.”

“She didn’t talk about me?” Tris asked.

“She did,” Eric agreed. “She asked about the fact that your score had been hand recorded. I said that the computer had ‘broken’. Which only brought up the fact that the computer ‘broke’ again while you were undergoing the fear simulations. But I countered that with the fact that the other computer, the one Four was using, also broke. We talked about updating all of the computers for a moment after that before we launched into a conversation about this year’s initiates.”

“You probably understood a lot more of what happened with the testing than I did,” Tris said. They both knew that she meant the coding that had been on literally every other screen besides the one that showed what was happening inside the simulation. 

“Part of it was the code that allows the serum to be programed,” Eric started.

“I didn’t know that they could be programed,” Tris said. “I mean, I know that there’s tiny receivers in it that allow it to show up on the screens or to allow other people to experience the same simulation.”

“Yes, but there’s a lot more than just having a joint experience or having it be viewed somewhere,” Eric said. “It also controls what you see and how the program ends. It’s all very complex, and it takes years to master all of the coding involved in making the serum. Most of the people in that room, such as your brother, are being trained by some of the older members.”

“How is it that divergents are able to manipulate the simulations so easily?” Tris asked.

“If we knew that, then Jeanine would have put a stop to the divergents being able to manipulate them,” Eric said quickly.

“Do you think that my mom might know?” Tris asked eagerly. “She’s from outside. There’s something about the divergents that she knows, and I think that she hasn’t told anybody half of the secrets, even about ourselves.”

“Maybe,” Eric said slowly. “But if she didn’t even tell you where she was born until last week, what exactly makes you think that she’s going to tell you about why divergents are the way that they are?”

Tris was silent for a moment as she mulled over her words. “The part of me who still only views her as being my Abnegation mother wants to say, ‘Of course she’s going to tell me if I ask’. But the realistic part of me, the part that’s only just now starting to understand that there’s a hell of a lot more to my mother than her life in Abnegation, says otherwise.”

“I think that you’re finally starting to understand the most basic secret of being an adult,” Eric said as he flashed her a cocky smile. “It’s a hell of a lot more complex than anybody could have ever warned you about.”

“Yes, but I don’t think that most people have to deal with this many problems. Especially not within a week of becoming a full-fledged faction member.”

“No, but admittedly, I think that things are even worse for you because you picked to be a leader-in-training,” Eric said. He leaned in and kissed her. “Not like I’m complaining because it only means that I get more opportunities to see you during the day.” He kissed her again.

“Aren’t you at all worried that seeing each other all the time will make us tired of one another?” Tris asked as she looked up into his eyes.

“We don’t see each other that much,” Eric said with a roll of his eyes. “I show you how to do something, and then I leave you to it. My schedule doesn’t revolve around babysitting you. I do have things to do, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” Tris said. She thought about all of the hours that she’d spent in the giant filing room, reorganizing literally every hard-copy receipt, every meeting transcript, every complaint lodged against another Dauntless member. And she thought about how Eric would escort her to the room every morning, and come and get her for lunch and dinner.

“And your schedule will get a hell of a lot busier if you ever become a full leader, too,” Eric went on. “All of the meetings, having to schedule even more meetings for later, having to come up with new ways to make Dauntless as efficient as possible. Not only for Dauntless itself, but for the other factions and the entire city as a whole.”

“Yes, I know,” Tris said, her eyes downcast. “I might have only been working here for a week, but I’m not completely unobservant. Plus, I read that agreement that I signed. And I mean, really read it.”

“I knew that you would,” Eric said. He leaned back against the sofa and raked a hand through his hair. “Urg, I don’t want to talk about work anymore. Let’s just have like… an hour where we don’t talk about work or divergents or the Allegiants or the Watchers or anything.”

“Okay,” Tris said slowly. “Christina and Will have been talking about ado-” Tris broke off when Eric pressed his lips to hers. 

“Actually, I think that we shouldn’t talk at all,” Eric said. He punctuated each word with a kiss. He pulled Tris closer, and she happily moved until her right leg was pressed up against his left leg.

But this position left Tris’s spine twisted at an awkward angle. She didn’t want to stop kissing Eric, so instead, she decided to climb up onto his lap. Eris wrapped his arms around Tris’s waist to pull her closer to him, and she twisted her fingers into the fabric that covered his shoulders. 

*

It was all to easy for them to lose track of time like that as they explored the skin that was exposed with both fingers and lips. “What time is it?” Eric asked after a while. He was lying on his back on the sofa with Tris on top of him. Her hair fanned out around them like a blonde curtain. 

“Um…” Tris looked at her watch. “It’s a bit after ten. I think that our hour is up.”

“I should go,” Eric said, but made no move to sit up or to push Tris away. He offered her a cocky smile. “After all, we’re not going to be given all of tomorrow off, too.”

“Y-you don’t have to go,” Tris stammered out. “I-I mean, if you don’t want to.”

“Just what exactly are you asking?” Eric asked as he flashed her another cheeky smile.

“I don’t know,” Tris moaned as she buried her face in Eric’s shoulder in embarrassment. 

“Hey hey, it’s okay,” Eric said quickly as he sat up on his elbows and wrapped his arms around Tris’s waist to keep her in place. “I’m just teasing you. You know that I’d never do anything without your consent. It just seems like a pretty big step… inviting me to stay the night.”

“It’s not like it’s the first time that we’ve shared a bed,” Tris said as she looked up at him through her lashes.

“No, but that was different. It was a choice between you going back to the dorms and Peter or us sharing a bed,” Eric explained, his voice low. 

“Never mind then,” Tris said as she stood up. “It was stupid and I shouldn’t have said anything. I don’t even know why I did.” 

“Hey, come on,” Eric said as he grabbed Tris’s wrist before she could walk away. “Don’t be like that. Do you want me to stay or not?”

Tris licked her lips as she looked down at Eric’s hand holding her wrist. Then, she looked up and met his gaze. “Yes,” she said without hesitation. 

Eric offered her a shit-eating grin before he jumped to his feet and picked Tris up. She let out a loud squeal of surprise which quickly turned into laughter as he carried her into the bedroom. 

 

* * *

Tris turned away from the light that was just starting to creep into her bedroom window. She’d completely forgotten to close the curtains last night, but Eric was a very good distraction. She looked across the room at the red display of her alarm clock and saw that it was only just a bit after six. Neither of them had to be at work until closer to eight; she still had some more time to sleep. 

A soft breath behind her reminded her that she was not alone. She smiled softly to herself as she moved to lie on her back, and turned her head to observe Eric as he slept. He was facing her, as he had been for most of the night as he held her. Sometime during the night, however, she’d twisted away from him and his hand rested lightly on top of the sheet between them. 

She studied his face for a moment and was surprised at how comfortable that she felt towards somebody with an eyebrow ring, a lip ring, and giant, black tattoos on his neck. When Tris had seen him at the Choosing Ceremony a month ago, it had been hard for her to see past all of that. Then, after she’d picked Dauntless and he turned into her initiation teacher, it had been hard for her to see past his rough, drill-sergeant attitude.

Tris tried for a moment to picture what he might have looked like just two years ago. A scared dependent from Erudite, worried about what Jeanine had planned for him in Dauntless. After she failed at trying to imagine it, Tris realized that it didn’t matter. Because the man who lay next to her in the bed now was the important part. 

Her eyes took in the light-colored hair of a few days growth that was on his cheek, chin, and jaw. It was a bit of a foreign concept to Tris. Every day, her father woke up and promptly went to shave before he even came down for breakfast. And Caleb was only just beginning to have notable hair growth on his chin before he turned sixteen and picked Erudite. 

Almost without meaning to, Tris turned and gently touched her fingers to the stubble on his cheek. It was rough against her skin, and she hesitantly moved her hand up towards his ear to feel the grit and pull of it against her fingers. Eric let out an annoyed groan, and Tris pulled her hand back quickly, a little ashamed at having been caught. 

Eric grabbed her wrist and put her hand back on his face. Then, he opened his eyes. “I don’t like waking up in the morning, but if I have to wake up, then I’d rather wake up like this,” he whispered. He let go of her wrist and Tris started to stroke his face. “Do you like it?” She gave a noncommittal sound. “I’ve been thinking of growing a beard. Maybe mutton chops.”

“Mutton chops?” Tris asked with a slight laugh. 

“Yes. Don’t you think that I’d look amazing with mutton chops?”

“Amazingly ridiculous, you mean,” Tris said with a roll of her eyes. Eric laughed at that. 

“Maybe you’re right. That fashion should not come back,” he said. He moved closer to her and pressed a gentle kiss on the side of her chin before he half sat-up in order to look at the clock. “Oh my god, Tris, are you serious? It’s only 6!” he complained louder as he flopped back down onto the bed. 

“Sorry,” Tris said quickly. Eric wrapped his arm around her waist and hooked a leg over hers as he pulled her closer. 

“On the other hand, it’s only six,” he said with a cocky grin. 

 

* * *

“I know that Eric has been doing most of your training thus-far, but I felt like we needed some time to really bond,” April said as she handed Tris a cup of coffee. 

“Bond?” Tris asked with some confusion. 

“Yes, bond. You know, have some girl talk. Woman-to-woman. Or whatever.” April plopped down into the other chair in front of the big monitor. “Well, sort of. We can get to know one another as I train you with viewing the fear serum and fear landscape simulations.” 

Thus far, Tris hadn’t really spent any sort of time with any of the other Dauntless leaders besides Eric. She wasn’t even sure what kind of people that they were, although Eric had warned her away from Max without going into any sort of details. Tris was a little frightened of the oldest male leader, but April seemed like somebody’s crazy grandmother. The kind who like to skydive on their birthday. Although Tris wasn’t sure hold old that April was, and neither was Eric, she was much older than any other Dauntless member. 

April held out a computer disk that was labeled “George Wu”. The name sounded very familiar to Tris, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on why. Tris put the disk into the computer, and then sat back to watch the simulation. 

It was hazy at first, and then it came into focus. A room. A living room. It looked like it was in Dauntless. There was an older couple on the sofa, and a young teen, maybe a few years younger than Tris, sat on the floor across from the person whose simulation that it was, George. The girl looked up and flashed a smile at George, and Tris’s heart caught in her throat. 

Tori. 

Tris shot a confused look over to the old woman. “Don’t look at me, watch the simulation! It’s just getting to the best part!” April exclaimed rather gleefully. 

Tris reluctantly turned her attention back to the screen. Two masked men burst into the room. Tris flinched as the mom was shot in the forehead, and then again as the dad was also shot in the forehead. Both fell over, dead. 

“Please no, not my sister,” George exclaimed as he jumped up to protect his sister. One of the gun-men fired at George, and he threw up his arm to protect his face. 

Things seemed to be moving in slow motion…

“This is the best,” April said. Tris was suddenly aware that, no, time was moving at a normal rate for her. It was the simulation that was literally moving in slow motion. 

Tris watched as the bullet inched along towards where George stood in front of Tori. After a moment, George realized what was happening. He looked up at the murders, raised his hand towards them. The bullet flipped over, and then before Tris knew what was happening, the man who’d fired at George was lying flat on his back with a bloody hole in the center of his forehead. 

Then, the screen faded to snow. April paused the player, and turned to look at Tris. 

“Would you care to guess what you just witnessed?” April asked. 

“I… I don’t know,” Tris said cautiously. Eric had never said anything about being able to trust April, and right now, Tris was her guard. There was probably a very good reason why the old lady had gotten to be so old, and it wasn’t because she enjoyed baking cupcakes. 

“I like you, Tris, so I’m going to give you a second to think about your answer, okay?” April said.

“This wasn’t a fear landscape, so he shouldn’t have been able to control things like that,” Tris said at once. 

“That’s a good girl,” April said. She skipped back to the beginning of the video and started to play it again. “Look at that look of pure discovery on his face when he realizes that he’s not dead, and that he’s the one who’s in control.” They watched to the end of the simulation again, and then April paused it once more. “Of course, you understand what happened to George, right, Tris? I know for a fact that you are… as close as one can be towards Tori, George’s sister.”

“Yes, Tori told me,” Tris said quietly. 

“Buck up, Tris,” April said sternly. “We all can’t have hunky leaders to delete footage and destroy Dauntless property for us.” She winked at the younger woman, and Tris bristled with discomfort. 

Exactly how much did April know, and why was she telling Tris this?

April laughed, but not unkindly. “I see that you’re catching on. How’s your mother?” 

“She’s fine,” Tris stammered out.

“Good, good. She was always a sweetheart, even when she was in Dauntless. What? You didn’t know that? Huh, I guess that there are some things that not even Abnegation parents will tell their children.”

“She’s in Abnegation now, so her past in Dauntless doesn’t matter anymore,” Tris said quickly.

“Hey, now you’re getting the hang of things, Tris! Okay, so let’s keep moving. Even though George was killed, we still have a bunch of his simulations to look through. He’s the prime example of divergence. When we’re through with George’s simulations, then we’ll move on to somebody a lot less interesting.”

 

* * *

Tris found Tori working on a tattoo later that evening. “Hey, Tris,” the older woman greeted Tris when Tris walked over to Tori’s work area. “What can I help you with?”

“Nothing,” Tris said absently. She watched as Tori worked to ink an intricate heart design on the man’s arm. “I just wanted to come and see you. When you get a second, I’d like a word with you.”

“Yeah, sure,” Tori said. “You know where the back room is. Make yourself at home.” 

Tris went into the back and had just finished fixing herself a cup of tea when Tori came in. “Hi, what’s this about? Not… That?” Tori asked. 

“Yes and no,” Tris said carefully. She blew across the top of her tea before she took a careful sip. “April started to teach me how to properly view the simulations today. We… uh… got off to an interesting start. Of course, the main goal is to be on the look out for divergents, and, well…” Tris observed Tori over the top of the tea cup. 

Tori pressed her lips together and her nostrils flared out. After a moment, she said, “I see. Is that all that you had to say?”

“Have you seen them?” Tris asked.

“No.”

“I don’t mean to overstep here, but, I can see why.”

Tori’s eyes widened for a moment before she schooled her face. “I have other clients to get to, so you should probably leave.” 

Tris set down her cup and stood. Before she moved to leave, she reached inside of her pants pocket and pulled out a USB stick. She set it down on the table next to the cup, and then she left without looking back at the older woman. 

Tori waited until she heard the jingle of the bell above the shop door, and then she walked over and picked up the stick. It was still warm from having been in Tris’s pocket. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, please let me know if you spotted any grammatical errors or typos so that I might fix them.
> 
> And, if you're enjoying this, please take a few seconds to let me know in a review or to leave kudos. I appreciate all of the reviews and kudos that have already been left.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello my pretties; did you miss me? I have been exceptionally successful during Nanowrimo and wrote over 68k words in 22 days. I still have one more book to write before I can even think about publishing, but I'm almost there. Thanks for being patient with me. I'm trying to get back into the swing of this story, but I'm determined to see it through to the end.
> 
> Anyway, on to this chapter and the appropriate warnings:
> 
> 1) Somebody shot themselves in the head and it gets a tiny bit graphic
> 
> 2) Brief mentions of pornographic magazines and the things that porno mags have inside of them
> 
> 3) A suicide letter from Al (things get a bit rough with this; you might need a tissue...)

Tris was awoken by somebody roughly banging on the door. “For the love of…” Eric grumbled as he ripped back the covers and jumped out of bed. “Stay here.”

“Sorry to disturb your sleep, but somebody ate a bullet,” a voice at the front door said a moment later. Tris’s heart leapt into her throat. It was almost a repeat of the night that Al had died.

“Who?” Eric asked after he let out a frustrated sigh.

“Lewis Cottle.” The name was familiar to Tris, but she wasn’t quite sure why. “I’ll escort you to where he is.”

“Just give me a moment, okay?” Eric said. Tris scrambled out of bed and a moment later, Eric stormed back into the room. “Get dressed and steel yourself. This isn’t going to be pretty.”

Tris was already dressed in soft pants and a t-shirt of Eric’s that was huge on her. She only just had to pull her boots on, while Eric pulled a t-shirt and his shoes on. Then, the two of them left the apartment. The man who’d come to get Eric looked a little surprised to see Tris there as well, but quickly schooled his features.

“This way,” he said.

Five minutes later found the three of them ducking under the crime scene tape that blocked off the entrance to one of the halls in the main part of the Dauntless compound. Max, Ken, Jeremy, and Steve were already there, standing over a sheet that was draped over the body in the middle of the hall. There was blood splattered all over the wall, as well as something that was a sort of pinkish grey color.

Brain, Tris realized, and fought the urge to vomit.

“Oh good, you’re here,” Max said to Tris with a sneer as the two of them approached the body. “The man who went to wake you said that he knocked on your door for a good five minutes before he gave up.”

“She was with me,” Eric said simply. A woman wearing medical scrubs and gloves knelt down by the body and pulled the sheet back. It was even worse to see what was left of Lewis Cottle, because half of his scull was missing.

Ate a bullet indeed.

But as Tris looked at the man, she remembered where she’d met him before: he’d been one of the volunteers two weeks ago when she and Eric had taken the first batch over to Erudite to test out the new simulation serum. She didn’t think that she’d said a lot to him, just “Hello” and “How are you?”.

Tris wanted to turn away, to look anywhere but at his mutilated face, but she sensed Max’s cold eyes on her, judging every movement that she made. So she swallowed her bile and pretended like she was anywhere but here. That she was looking at anything but Lewis Cottle.

After what seemed like a year to Tris, but it was probably only just thirty seconds, the Dauntless nurse pulled the sheet back over the body. “What happened?” Eric asked, all business. Tris had no idea how he managed to do it.

“Ate a bullet,” Ken said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Who found him?” Eric pressed.

“Some lady,” Ken went on, and pointed towards the other end of the hall, where some uniformed Dauntless patrol officers were standing around. “They’ve already taken her statement, though.”

“I want to talk to her,” Eric said gruffly before he strode off. For a lack of anything better to do— and literally anything was better than standing around and staring at the blood and brain splattered on the wall— Tris hurried after him.

The patrol officers parted as the two of them approached, and one of them pointed around the corner, to another officer, who sat on a bench next to a young woman who was wrapped up with a blanket and clutching a cup of coffee. Her hands were violently shaking, and, even in the dim light, Tris could see that there were dried tear tracks on her cheeks.

As they got closer, the patrol officer who was sitting with the woman looked up and Tris realized that it was Christina. Christina gave them a look of pure surprise before she jumped up to her feet and walked over to them.

“I didn’t expect to see you here, but I can’t say that I’m overly surprised, really,” Christina said.

“I’d like to talk to the witness,” Eric said.

Christina went back to the lady. “These people want to have a word with you. I’m going to be just over there if you need me, okay?” she asked. The lady only nodded, and looked up at Eric and Tris.

“Hello, what’s your name?” Eric asked her as he sat down next to her.

“Kelly,” she said. “I’m Lewis’s girlfriend.”

“How did you know that he’d be down here?” Eric asked.

“I didn’t,” Kelly explained. “He was supposed to come to my apartment, but he never showed up, and I fell asleep. When I woke up, he still wasn’t there. I was worried for him, so I went to try and find him. But… he wasn’t in his apartment, either. I was just walking back to my apartment, and I decided that maybe I should walk around the compound to try and find him. Maybe he’d gotten into trouble or something. So I was just randomly walking along and then…” She burst into a fresh wave of tears.

Eric gave Tris a very uncomfortable look. Tris sat down on Kelly’s other side and put her arm around Kelly’s shoulders. But she didn’t know what to say to the woman. Every word of comfort seemed out of place. Her boyfriend had killed himself— things were not going to be okay.

“Had he said anything to you about how he was upset over something recently?” Eric went on after Kelly had calmed down a little bit.

“No. No, the opposite, in fact!” Kelly insisted. “He worked at the Dauntless hospital, cleaning all of the equipment. It’s a different job from the janitors, because it takes special training. You can’t just use a scalpel on one person, and then use it on another person without cleaning it properly first. But he was getting a promotion of sorts and he was going to start making a little bit more money. That’s why we were going to meet tonight— to celebrate his promotion.”

“Okay. How about in his personal life?”

“He had some friends, but I can’t think of anybody who was rather mean to him or anything to the point where he’d want to kill himself,” Kelly explained.

“Okay,” Eric said again. He gave a slight nod of his head before he stood. “I can’t think of anything more, but I might have some more questions for you later. Do you want me to get Officer Wilkins?”

“Um, yes please,” Kelly said softly. Eric left and a moment later, Christina came back over.

“I can take it from here, Tris,” Christina said. Tris got up and went over to where Eric stood, a bit away from the other patrol officers. He had something in his hands; Tris realized that it was a key.

“What’s that for?” Tris asked with some confusion.

“We’re going to go search his apartment,” Eric said. They had to walk past where the body was in order to reach Lewis’s apartment building.

April had just arrived; she was wearing a bathrobe and her brown-grey hair was in rollers. “Wow, yeah. It’s a motherfucking dead body. I’m soooo glad that you woke me up at butt-fuck o’clock and dragged my sorry ass all the way down here so that I could see this,” April said. The other leaders just looked like they agreed with what April had said, but there was no way that they were going to so much as verbally agree with her. April looked at Tris and Eric as they walked closer. “Where are you two going?”

“We’re going to search the victim’s apartment,” Eric explained.

“Oh good. At least somebody here has something better to do than to stand over a dead body with their hands in their pockets. I’m going back to bed. Let’s have a meeting at eight about this. Not like I expect that there’ll be much to discuss. The guy blew his fucking brains out. It took somebody three hours just to fucking find him. I’m going back to bed.”

Lewis Cottle’s apartment wasn’t much to look at. It was at least half the size of Tris’s place, but it told the tale of a life somebody had lived. Dirty dishes were stacked in the sink and on the counter, there were piles of clothes on the sofa, and mail and magazines were piled up high on the kitchen table.

“Go check in the bedroom,” Eric said.

“What am I looking for?” Tris asked as she walked across to the open doorway.

“The main thing right now is a note,” Eric said.

“A note? What kind of a note?”

“People who kill themselves tend to leave suicide notes,” Eric explained gently.

“What?” Tris said. She stopped and stared at Eric. “But Al didn’t leave a note.” Eric let out a frustrated sigh and raked a hand through his hair. “What? He didn’t leave a note, did he?”

“He did, actually,” Eric said slowly after a minute. “It was found under his pillow. I didn’t want to tell you about it because you were upset enough as it was. The note would only upset you more.”

“I want to see it,” Tris said without hesitation.

“We’ll talk about it later, okay?” Eric said. “We’ve got work to do, unless you don’t actually want to get back to bed tonight.”

Tris turned around and went into Lewis’s bedroom. It was equally messy in there, and there were more clothes scattered all over the floor, and some magazines. “Gross,” Tris gasped when she realized that most of those were porn magazines. But then curiosity got the best of her and she picked up the closest one and looked at the model who was on the page that had been left open. The woman was spreading the lips of her vagina apart with her fingers as if inviting the viewers for a closer look.

Tris turned the page and let out a startled squeak when she saw the picture. It was decidedly way more graphic than the other page had been, and featured a man inserting his penis into the same woman’s vagina.

“What’s wrong?” Eric said as he stepped into the doorway. “Oh god, don’t look at that!” He was at her side in an instant and snatched the magazine away from Tris. She caught a glimpse of the title, “Dauntless Hardcore”.

“What the hell is that?” Tris asked. Her face felt like it was about to catch on fire.

“You know very well what it is,” Eric said as he held the magazine behind his back. Not like it did much good, because there were other porn magazines open on the floor. He dropped the magazine onto the floor, and then steered Tris out from the room. “Go search the front room. Those magazines are only back-issues of ‘Guns and Ammo’ and ‘Dauntless Digest’.”

Tris was more than happy to be able to leave the bedroom, and started to sort through the stacks of things on the kitchen table. Bills, bills, letters from old friends, a couple of last warnings about paying his rent and electric bills… but no suicide note. Not even a grocery list.

She then moved to start looking through the magazines. Eric had been right— these magazines were all very G and PG rated. She shook each magazine out before she flipped through it absently in search of something that didn’t belong, but nothing jumped out at her as being overly suspicious.

Tris had moved to start looking through the clothes on the sofa when Eric came out from the bedroom. He shut the door firmly behind him and couldn’t met Tris’s eye.

“Should we be looking into the girlfriend?” Tris asked hesitantly. “It doesn’t seem normal for a guy to have that much porn if he also had a girlfriend.”

“Trust me when I say that there’s nothing unusual about that amount of porn,” Eric said quickly. Tris felt her face heating up again.

“But he has… had a girlfriend. Why would… You know what, never mind.” She shook her head slightly. “Just search the kitchenette and I’ll look in the bathroom.”

Eric nodded with agreement, and went into the little kitchen area. Tris went to search the bathroom. It was the only place in the entire apartment that was the cleanest, although Tris had no idea why. “Any luck?” Eric asked from the doorway of the bathroom.

“No,” Tris said. “But there’s probably about a billion other hiding places around here. Do suicide victims usually hide a note very well?”

“It depends on the person,” Eric said. “Let’s call it a night. We can search some more after the meeting.” They locked up the apartment before they went to the elevator. Tris awkwardly stared at her shoes, unable to get the images of the people having sex from her mind. Eric heaved a frustrated sigh and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I can tell that you’re dying to ask, so just say it.”

Tris silently shook her head and felt her face heating up. Eric sighed again and was about to say something when the elevator doors slid open. They left the building and started to walk back to their own apartment building.

“In Erudite, we were always taught not to suppress our sexual desires because suppressing them only leads to us doing rash and stupid things. People are very sexual creatures; we crave intimacy. But we’re also conditioned to want monogamy. It seems a hell of a lot healthier to look at porn and masturbate than to have a string of meaningless flings with women whose names that I won’t remember come morning.”

The elevator doors slid open and Tris blankly followed Eric down the hall to his apartment. “Do you have any, though?” she asked once he’d shut the door.

“Yes,” Eric said without hesitation.

“Where? I haven’t seen any lying around.”

“Do you honestly think that I’m that disgusting? That’d I’d just leave it sitting out on the coffee table?” He gestured to the table in question.

“No, I guess not,” Tris said as her face flushed. “I just… I don’t know. I kind of want to see it now. I’m curious.” Eric lead her into the bedroom, turned the light on, and knelt down by his bed. He pulled out a box from under the bed, and dumped the contents out. There were lots of different issues of “Dauntless Hardcore”, but also a few copies of “Faction Forum”, “Sexy Scientists”, and “All Rise”. Tris picked up an issue of “All Rise”, and read the byline under the title, “Candor’s #1 Adult Magazine”. She held it up to show Eric. “How did you even get this?”

“Some of the guys exchange porn sometimes,” Eric said with an absent shrug. “It’s… interesting to see the different factions take on porn and sex.”

Tris dropped the magazine, and looked through the different ones. There were a few others from Candor and Erudite, but nothing from Abnegation. “No Abnegation magazines?” she asked, feeling a little disappointed.

“Why are you even surprised about that?” Eric asked with a laugh. “They’d probably think that it would be selfish of the models to put themselves on display for a man’s sexual arousal. Besides, can you imagine what Abnegation porn would be like? You know better than anybody how modestly that they dress. Showing off a little bit of ankle would be very scandalous.”

Tris pulled her boots off, put her foot up on the bed, and then she slowly pulled the fabric over her knee so that the hem of her pants rose. “Look, Eric. I’m showing you my ankle,” she said playfully.

“How scandalous, Ms. Prior,” Eric said as he walked around the other side of the bed. “I ought to arrest you for public indecency.” He wrapped his arms around her from behind and nuzzled the side of her neck. “Let’s get back to bed and try to get a little bit more sleep before the meeting.”

“Right,” Tris said. She tipped her head back and kissed Eric lightly before he pulled away and started to sweep all of the magazines back into the box.

 

* * *

“But not everybody writes a suicide note, though,” Ken pointed out later at the meeting.

“He does have a point,” Steve said. “Just drop it, Eric. You can’t win this one. All evidence points to suicide.”

“Fine,” Eric snapped. “Are we done here?” He got to his feet before anybody could answer him and stormed out from the room.

“Eric,” Tris said as she scrambled to her feet and went after him. She caught up to him just as he was going inside his office. “Why are you so upset over this?”

“I hate not knowing the answer to things,” Eric snapped as he sat down behind his desk. “And not knowing why he killed himself is going to drive me insane.”

“Just because the other leaders don’t want to waste resources looking into the matter doesn’t mean that we can’t,” Tris said. She walked around the desk and wrapped her arms around Eric from behind. “Like I said last night, there were still a lot of little hiding places in Lewis’s apartment. We didn’t exactly do a very good check because it was late and we were tired.”

Eric gently picked up one of Tris’s arms that was wrapped around his shoulders and pressed a light kiss onto the pulse point of her wrist. “Yes, you’re right,” he said after a moment. “We’ll go back later. Like after dinner.”

“Hey, are you going to show me Al’s suicide note?” Tris asked softly.

“Shit, I’d honestly hoped that you would have forgotten about that,” Eric said. “If you really want to see it, though, I’ll go get it.”

Tris pulled away from Eric and twisted her fingers together. She looked down at her hands, the way that her fingers interlocked with one another. “I do,” she said quietly. “I don’t think that my opinion of him could get any lower than it already is, so I don’t think that it’ll hurt.”

Eric turned around to look at her. “If you’re sure…”

Tris looked up at him and pursed her lips together. “I am,” she said at last.

“Then I’ll go get it,” Eric said as he stood up. “Wait here.” He left the room, and Tris sat down in his vacated chair to wait. Eric came back after a few minutes with a thin file folder in his hands. Tris might have seen it or even moved it during her work in the file room, but something told her that Eric had hidden it somewhere else. He pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to her. “Do you want me to leave?”

“No, stay,” Tris insisted. Her hands were shaking as she unfolded the paper.

_I am a coward_ , the letter started. _I realize this now. I thought that if I could pretend as if I was brave, that I actually would be. Literally everybody thought that I’d end up in Abnegation. I didn’t want that. I’m not very smart, and it’s hard for me to want to tell the truth. Dauntless seemed like the only place where I could go to be free._

_I felt free for a while. I made friends. I was happy. For once in my life, I honestly felt as if I belonged._

_And then I saw my ranking for the second stage._

_None of my friendships mattered at all, because they couldn’t help me to face the reality of what I was. A coward. I struggled with stage one, and stage two was even harder for me._

_I didn’t want to listen to Peter at first. He was like the proverbial devil on my shoulder. He whispered to me all of the things that I could become, but none of that would be reality if I had to leave Dauntless. He whispered to me about a plan. It seemed harmless, really. He told me about how he’d stabbed Edward in the eye. He became number one for stage one._

_If Tris was out of the way…_

_I didn’t want to hurt her. Not really. She was my friend._

_But the longer that I thought about it, the more I started to like the idea. Tris for my spot in Dauntless. She’d understand… right? So we were waiting for her that night in the dorm, and we somehow got lucky when she left the room. I snuck up behind her and grabbed her._

_But the closer that we got to the Chasm, the more I began to have second thoughts. Tris was my friend. She wouldn’t understand. She’d think that it was a shitty thing of me to do. To kill her just so that I might have a better chance at remaining in Dauntless._

_But I am a worthless pile of shit, I know that now. And where would it end? If Tris was dead, then that would be one less transfer. But I would still be in competition with the Dauntless-born. I didn’t stand a chance._

_But I stood by and did nothing. I watched as Peter attempted to rape Tris. I ran and hid like a coward when Eric came and chased us away. I did nothing as Eric put Drew in the hospital._

_I’m not a very religious person, but when I saw Tris later, I tried to ask her for her forgiveness. I don’t know why I even bothered, because I think that everybody knew what she would say. She might have been born in Abnegation, but what I did to her was something that not even a full Abnegation member could ever forgive._

_She told me that if I ever came near her again, she’d kill me. I guess that I’m taking the decision out from her hands. I’m doing Tris— and the rest of the world— a favor._

_By the time that you read this, I’ll already be dead. Goodbye._

_Albert Boyd_

 

Tris had barely been able to read the last few sentences because her eyes were clouded with tears.

She set the letter aside, stood, walked over to Eric, and fell into his arms. He cradled her against his chest and whispered soothing, nonsense words into her ear.

“He shouldn’t have chosen Dauntless in the first place,” Tris whispered after a while.

“No, he shouldn’t have,” Eric simply agreed.

 

* * *

“Tris, wake up,” Eric barked as he stormed into the room and flipped the light on.

“Huh, what? What’s going on?” Tris asked sleepily. She glanced at the clock and started to panic a little when she saw that it was 1 AM. “What happened?”

“Holly smuggled me the autopsy report on Lewis Cottle,” Eric explained as he tossed a file folder onto the bed. Then, he threw open Tris’s closet and started to look through her clothes. “Do you still have your Abnegation dress? The one that you were wearing when you joined Dauntless?”

“Yes, it’s in a box down there,” Tris said as she got out of bed. “Why? What’s happening? What’s in the report?”

“Just read it, okay?” Eric said as he got the box out, pulled the dress out, and stuffed it into his bag. “Come on, come on.” He hustled Tris out of her room; she barely had time to grab her shoes on the way out.

In the elevator, Tris handed Eric back the folder so that she could put her shoes on. She didn’t know where Eric was taking her, but she was willing to bet that she’d need her shoes. Eric didn’t give her any time to actually read the report, however, and he practically dragged her to the Pit, and then down the stairs to the river.

This was only Tris’s third time going to the room hidden under the city, and it was not any easier than it had been the first time. In fact, since Tris’s heart was hammering her chest and she was still a little asleep and she really had to pee, it made it a little harder.

Eric unlocked the hidden door and lead her into the room. It was dark in there, and nobody else was present. “Are we having an emergency meeting?” Tris asked with confusion as Eric lead her across to one of the other, many doors.

“We would be, but we’re the first to know, after Holly,” Eric said. He opened another door— it was a closet. Tris was a little surprised. There were boxes and bags of clothing, and Eric started to look through one of them that was filled with grey Abnegation clothing. “I only just found her message myself. Go change. I promise that I won’t look.”

He didn’t even joke around about peeking. Tris took her dress from Eric and went over to the corner to change. She heard the door to the closet close, and knew that Eric would change in there.

The dress was familiar to her, even after nearly two months of not having worn it. Tris’s fingers absently pulled her hair into a loose bun in the Abnegation style, and then she looked at the folder that was sticking out from Eric’s bag by the closet door. She went over and pulled it out to try and figure out what was going on.

The first page of the report was a diagram of the body, and had marked all of the injuries. Of course the gunshot wound was the biggest one, but there were also mentions of old scars, bruises, and a leg that had been broken when Lewis had been younger. But Tris knew what the cause of death had been, so she flipped to the next page.

There were a lot of words that she didn’t understand, and it made it hard to comprehend what had gotten Eric so worked up. She just sort of skimmed along, her eyes taking in the individual letters, but not really seeing anything at all. She turned to the next page, where something had been highlighted. “His blood contained unusual amounts of microchips. It is not uncommon to find trace amounts of the materials used to make the microchips in the bodies of Dauntless because of their high use of so-called ‘fear serum’, but these chips were completely whole.”

Tris’s heart began to hammer in her chest. What did it mean that the chips were whole? Even if Lewis had used the fear serum minutes before he’d killed himself, they still would have dissolved.

It had been two days before a medical examiner in Erudite had done the autopsy on the body. Eric had told her when they’d started to use the fear serum that as soon as the simulation ended, the microchips started to dissolve, and would have been mostly gone within an hour.

“Are you dressed?” Eric asked from the closet.

“Yes,” Tris agreed. Eric stepped out and Tris had to press her lips together to stop herself from laughing out loud.

“You are never going to pass for an Abnegation,” she said.

“Yeah yeah, I know, but it’s just for a few minutes in the areas where we can’t avoid the cameras,” Eric said. He pulled out a bottle of liquid concealer. “Help me cover my neck tattoos.”

“I don’t have any sponges, so it’s not going to be great,” Tris said as she took the bottle and started to work the makeup over the bits of his tattoos that weren’t covered by the already high collar on the Abnegation shirt. While she worked, Eric pulled the rings out from his eyebrow, his lip, and his ear lobes and dropped them onto the table. “I didn’t really understand a lot of that report-” Tris started.

“I wouldn’t expect you to, nor was most of it relevant to us,” Eric said.

“But what does it mean that there were microchips in his blood, even two days after his death?”

“I can really only speculate at the reasoning behind why Erudite would develop microchips that didn’t instantly start to dissolve, but I can almost guarantee you that they all point back to one thing: bad news for divergents.”

Tris finished covering Eric’s tattoos, and stood back to observe her work. “It’ll never stand scrutiny, but if all we’re doing is going to my parent’s house and avoiding a few cameras, it’ll do.” She let out a frustrated sigh. “I wish that there was something that we could do about your hair, but it’ll be dark, and I’m sure that most of the people in the monitor room would have better things to do than watch what appears to be a young Abnegation couple out for an illicit, midnight stroll.”

“For once, it is I who will bow to your expertise on the matter of how Abnegation people should act,” Eric said as he stood and went over to one of the other doors. He unlocked it, and lead Tris through the door.

It was a dark tunnel that was slightly damp, but Tris was grateful that it wasn’t another part of the river. It was hard enough to walk along the stony bank in her Dauntless shoes, which were made for climbing like that. The Abnegation shoes were exceptionally flimsy in comparison.

They walked a few feet until they came to a giant storm grate. As they peered out into the gloom of the city, Tris recognized a park that was a few blocks away from her childhood home.

“Okay, the coast is clear,” Eric said, and quickly opened up the grate. It swung easily and without a sound— the Abnegation members who used it as an entrance into the secret room probably kept it well oiled.

“Take my arm,” Tris commanded as soon as they stepped out into the inky night. “Laugh and look at me like I’m the most beautiful thing in the world. We’re so in love that we’re willing to break Abnegation rules.”

“Not like that’s much of a stretch,” Eric said lowly as he linked his arm with Tris’s. Tris smiled slightly and looked down at her feet.

“And walk slowly. We don’t want to rush back home and be apart again,” Tris said.

“This is very strange, isn’t it?” Eric asked after a beat. “This could very well be us if things had turned out differently.”

“I don’t want for this to be us, though,” Tris said. She still kept her eyes down on her shoes. “I like how things are for me in Dauntless. I didn’t want to be feeding the homeless and tending to a farm for the rest of my life.”

“I’m just saying something for the sake of it looking like we’re having a romantic conversation,” Eric explained. They walked a few steps in silence. “Look up over my shoulder, but make it look like you’re looking up at me.” Tris did as he asked. “Do you see it?”

“Yes,” Tris said. Mounted up high and with a red light on the front of it, Tris knew that they were being watched.

“Now kiss me like an Abnegation would,” Eric said.

Tris leaned up on her tip-toes and pressed a chaste kiss to Eric’s lips.

She pulled away as quickly as she’d leaned up into him, and they continued to walk towards Tris’s parent’s house.

“No,” Eric said after a moment. “I wouldn’t want for us to be like this at all. Especially not if that’s how you’re only ever going to kiss me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again for being patient and thanks for reading. I really appreciate it.
> 
> As always, please let me know if you spotted any grammatical errors so that I can fix them.
> 
> And, like always, reviews and kudos are appreciated.


	13. Chapter 13

The house was exactly the same as it had been all of Tris’s life. But, as she considered the grey building, Tris didn’t know why she was so surprised over this. 

“Come on,” Eric whispered, and dragged Tris into the space between her parent’s house and the neighbor’s. He picked up a handful of pebbles and started to throw the little rocks up at her parent’s bedroom window. Tris didn’t even want to know how he knew where their room was. 

After the third pebble, Natalie appeared in the window, dressed in her nightgown with her hair down. She pointed towards the back yard, and then vanished. Eric and Tris hurried around to the back yard, and Natalie opened up the back door and ushered them inside.

“What’s wrong?” Natalie asked in a hushed voice once she’d shut the door behind them. 

“Three nights ago, a man shot himself in the head,” Eric started as he pulled the autopsy report out from under his shirt. “The Dauntless leaders thought that it was an open and closed case. Dauntless members lead rough lives— they get depressed, have no access to any sort of mental help, and they kill themselves. But as soon as I started to speak with his girlfriend, nothing seemed quite right. The girlfriend said that he was very happy and had no bullies that she knew of. His body was found in a hallway that was nowhere near his work, his apartment, her apartment, the dining hall, or the rest of the town. Tris and I searched all over his apartment but failed to find a suicide note. And then, this.” He opened up the folder and showed Natalie the highlighted passage. 

Natalie took the file over to the window where there was a little bit more light. She read it, and then shot a confused look over at Eric and Tris. 

“There’s one more thing,” Eric went on. “Something that’s not going to show up on the reports about his death.”

“What?” Natalie asked a bit breathlessly. 

“About two weeks ago, he was the first batch of volunteers to test out a new fear serum that Erudite is producing,” Eric explained. 

“Oh my god,” Natalie whispered as she sunk down into one of the kitchen chairs. 

“What are we going to do?” Tris asked as she looked between Eric and her mom. 

“This is not something that I’m going to be able to decide upon on my own,” Natalie said after a moment. “We need to have an emergency meeting, but how soon do you think that everybody can reach out to everybody? And I mean absolutely everybody.”

“Everybody? Are you insane?” Eric hissed. “It’s too dangerous!”

“And this isn’t?” Natalie said as she motioned to the report in her hand. “We might be about two seconds from an all-out war with Jeanine and her cohorts. Andrew?” Her father must have been lurking in the shadows of the living room, because Andrew Prior stepped into the kitchen quickly. “I need you to run across over to the Larson’s to tell them. You two, stop by the Corwin’s place on your way back to Dauntless, since it’s on the way. Meeting tomorrow at midnight. That should give everybody enough time. And of course, it goes without saying that you’ll alert everybody in Dauntless?”

“Yes,” Eric agreed quickly. They heard the front door close quietly, and Tris realized that she hadn’t even gotten to say a single word to her father. 

Natalie caught the rather wounded look on Tris’s face. “He’s very proud of you, you know,” she said to her daughter. “He’d never say it out loud, but when I whispered to him that you were the new Dauntless leader-in-training, you should have seen the look on his face.”

“I miss you guys, but I don’t miss being in Abnegation,” Tris said rather sadly. 

They waited about five minutes and then they snuck out the back door again. 

“The Corwin’s place is at the end of the block,” Tris said. “I don’t know where their rooms are, though, so, I don’t know what we want to do about that.”

“We’ll just chuck pebbles at a random window and hope that it’s the right one,” Eric whispered as they walked. This time, it was Tris who pulled Eric between two houses. Eric picked up a few more pebbles and started to throw them at an upstairs window.

After about five minutes of this, a man threw open the window, and he looked exceptionally angry. “What are you miscreants doing?” he hissed at them. Then, “Eric?”

“Yes,” Eric agreed.

“Wait there,” Mr. Corwin said. A minute later, he came around the side of the house. “What’s wrong? What’s happening?”

“Emergency meeting, tomorrow at midnight,” Eric whispered. “Help spread the word.”

“Right,” Mr. Corwin said. “Get home safely, you two.” They waited until Mr. Corwin had vanished around the back corner of his house before they set out again.

“Okay, nobody around,” Eric said. “We’re going to go back a different way, to avoid the same people spotting us on the monitors.” He linked arms with Tris again and they slowly started to walk away from the residential area of the Abnegation section of town. 

They walked over to one of the canals, which was currently dry. “They don’t always used this one, because it floods from time to time, as you might imagine,” Eric explained as they walked down the steps that lead into the canal. “But nobody thinks too much about it.”

“Where did all of these passage ways come from anyway? Were they there already?”

“I think that they existed before,” Eric said absently. “I don’t really know.”

They came to a part of the canal where a road passed overhead. Tris saw that there was a door set into the side of the bridge. If Tris hadn’t been looking for it, she wouldn’t have seen it at all. Eric unlocked the door and ushered Tris in before he closed the door and locked it behind them. 

The hall was dark and smelt like mildew. Eric pulled out his flashlight and brushed past Tris so that he could lead the way. When they finally go back to the Allegiant meeting room, Tris was exceptionally happy to see it. 

“Change back,” Eric said as he went back into the closet so that he could change, too.

“It’s a little sad for me to take the dress off again,” Tris said, her voice loud enough for Eric to hear her.

“Feeling nostalgic?” Eric teased her.

“No. Yes. I don’t know. I like the freedom of the Dauntless clothing, so it’s not that. I thought that I’d never wear this dress ever again, but I just couldn’t bring myself to throw it out.”

“You could leave it here if you want,” Eric said. “Somebody might get some use out of it if they needed to get into Abnegation without being spotted.”

“I think that I might,” Tris said. “Hey, what did you do with your Erudite clothing?”

“It’s here,” Eric said. “Are you dressed?”

“Yes,” Tris agreed. Eric stepped out and tossed something at Tris. She caught it, and then realized that it was a blue Erudite shirt. “This is yours?”

“Yes,” Eric said. Tris held it up to her nose, but it only smelt like the same kind of non-perfumed laundry soap that everybody used in Abnegation. Tris didn’t know why she was surprised; it had probably been in that closet for two years now. “Hey, come here.” Eric said as he walked closer to Tris. He pulled her into his arms and gave her a deep, lingering kiss. “Yes, that’s much better,” he whispered against her lips. “None of those bullshit, super chaste Abnegation kisses.”

“There’s nothing wrong with chaste kisses,” Tris said as she turned to put the Erudite shirt and her Abnegation clothes into the closet. 

“No,” Eric agreed. “But I like the option of being able to kiss you however I want, whenever I want. I don’t think that I’d be able to survive for long in Abnegation.” Tris poked him in the chest.

“Then it’s probably a very good thing that we’re not in Abnegation then,” she said. Eric hummed with agreement, and leaned down for another kiss. Tris wrapped her arms around his neck, but instantly pulled away from him with a look of disgust on her face.

“Oh, right. I need to wash that off,” Eric said as he looked at the foundation that was now smeared all over Tris’s arms. 

They walked out from the room, and Eric handed Tris the flashlight to hold. He then knelt down and started to rub the foundation off from his neck tattoos with water from the river. Tris watched as the makeup floated down the river until she could no longer see it. 

“Is it gone?” Eric asked after about a minute. Tris tipped his head up so that she could see better.

“Yeah, it’s gone,” she agreed. “Don’t forget your jewelry.”

“Right,” Eric said as he stood. “Wait here.” He went back into the meeting room, and when he came out, he locked the door behind him. Then, they started to make their way back towards the Dauntless compound. 

 

* * *

“Who in Dauntless do we need to talk to about this?” Tris asked Eric as they got ready for their day the next morning. Even though they’d started their nights in their individual beds, Eric had ended up back in Tris’s bed when they’d gotten back from Abnegation. 

“Talk to April first,” Eric said.

“Ha, I knew it!” Tris exclaimed around a mouth full of toothpaste. She spat into the sink and then straightened up again. “I had a weird conversation with her.”

“All conversations with April are weird,” Eric said dryly. 

“No, but she showed me George Wu’s simulations, and then she said a bunch of stuff about divergents and talked about you while being sort of… I don’t know?”

“A creepy old lady who says super sexual things about a man young enough to be her grandson?” Eric supplied.

“I wouldn’t have put it like that, but basically,” Tris agreed. 

“Talk to April after she gets in. Then, she’ll give you the name of somebody else to talk to.”

 

* * *

The meeting room was standing-room only. The few chairs that were in the room had been given to some of the older divergents, such as April. Even though everybody who knew her knew that she wouldn’t like to be treated as if she was old, they still gave her a chair, anyway. 

Tris had had no idea that there would be this many divergents in the city. It was a little crazy, honestly, but also exceptionally reassuring to know that she wasn’t alone. 

“Eric, where are you? I need you,” Natalie called out from somewhere near the middle of the room. There were too many tall people in the way, and Tris couldn’t see.

“If I don’t see you, then I’ll meet you back at my apartment later, okay?” Eric whispered to Tris. She nodded, and Eric offered her hand a reassuring squeeze before he left to go find Natalie. 

“Alright, listen up!” Eric barked out after about a minute. Even though she couldn’t see him, she knew that he’d switched back into his hard-ass initiate instructor mode. After a moment, the light chatter in the room fell silent. Eric explained about the death of Lewis Cottle, and the experiments in Erudite that he’d undergone just two weeks before his death. 

“What does this mean?”

“Do you think that his death has something to do with the fear serum?”

“Why wouldn’t the microchips have dissolved?”

“Be SILENT!” Eric barked, and the room quickly fell silent again. 

“This is still the early stages of whatever this might be, but, like you, my mind has instantly jumped to the worst possibly conclusions towards what this could mean,” Natalie said, her voice calm and gentle. “Erudite members? Have you anything to say about this?”

All of the Erudite members were standing in a group over near where the closet was. They whispered amongst themselves before somebody spoke up. “All but Holly agree that this is the first that we’re hearing about this.”

“The only reason why I even knew was because Eric asked me to get him a copy of the report,” Holly spoke up. “My father is a medical examiner, and I stole his keys and made myself a copy of the report so that it wouldn’t be missed. It was pretty standard stuff… until I got to the section on the toxicology report. It’s where they test to see if the deceased was drunk or on any sort of drugs at the time of their death. It stood out so much that the examiner made a note of it in his report, as Eric mentioned.”

“But what does it mean?” somebody asked. 

“Everybody, listen!” Natalie exclaimed. “We could be here for a week and not get through discussing the possible reasons for Jeanine to develop a new batch of fear serum with microchips that do not dissolve. But we need to come up with a plan of action in case this turns into what we’ve been anticipating for a long time now.”

This time, the silence that fell over the room was not because Eric had ordered for there to be silence. It was a scared silence, the kind of silence that falls over people when they’re completely scared out of their minds. 

“One of the things that needs to happen is that all divergents in Dauntless need to agree to no longer take the fear serum,” April spoke up after a moment of silence. 

“I know that this might come as a bit of a surprise to you, April, but most of us aren’t masochistic enough to use it,” Eric said, and pretty much everybody else in Dauntless quickly agreed with him. 

“But the fear serum that we believe delivered the microchips into Mr. Cottle’s body are not out of the testing stages yet,” somebody pointed out. 

“That you know if,” somebody else spoke up. “For all Dauntless knows, your blood is swimming with these microchips already.” The room burst forth with nervous talking. 

“BE QUIET!” Eric barked again. 

“Erudite, is there any way to do one of these tox reports on a living person?” Natalie asked. 

“Yes,” several of them said at once. 

“I can get into the lab after hours and run ‘blind’ samples,” Holly said. “Since I can’t exactly put your names down on the needles full of blood, I’ll just assign you guys all numbers. But we can discuss this at a later time. I know that this is important, but nobody told me that I’d be drawing blood samples today, so I didn’t exactly bring any equipment.”

“Okay, how else can we start to prepare for this war?” somebody spoke up after a beat of silence. 

“Dauntless, how fast do you think that we might be able to start stock-piling weaponry?” somebody else asked. Tris waited a moment for her mom to protest about this, but Natalie was silent.

“The others in Dauntless are bound to notice if a bunch of guns and bullets suddenly go unaccounted for,” April said. 

“What use is a gun to those of us who don’t know how to use them?” somebody asked. 

“If Dauntless initiate transfers can learn how to work a gun in under a week, so can you,” Tris spoke up.

“And it just so happens that we’ve got one of the Dauntless initiate teachers with us,” April said. 

“So this is it, then?” somebody said after a beat. “We’re going to start to train for a war?”

“Quite frankly, I’m only surprised that it’s taken this long to get to this point,” somebody else said. Tris agreed with them. If this entire “war on divergents” had been brewing since before Jeanine had taken over Erudite, why had it taken so long?

“Be quiet!” Eric said once more, but with less venom this time. 

“None of us want a war,” Natalie started slowly. “But if Jeanine is insisting on killing us all out of some misguided fear of what we really are, then we have no choice. It’s us verses them.” More scared silence fell over the room after this. She hadn’t said much, but she’d said enough. Everybody present knew what would happen to them if Jeanine discovered their divergence. “If there’s nothing else, then we’ll call the meeting now. I don’t want everybody to leave at once. Leave in groups of two or three, and only in five minute intervals while switching between the different factions who leave. Abnegation, you first, then a group of Candor, then Erudite, back to Abnegation, and so on. I need to talk with Holly and all of the Dauntless members, though, so please don’t leave.”

There was some whispering before three Abnegation people left the room. 

Tris needed to find Eric, but she figured that the best way to find him would be to stay put where he’d left her. That way, if he came for her, then she wouldn’t miss him amongst the crowd. 

And sure enough, after a few minutes, Eric appeared and made his way over to where Tris was. He wrapped his arms around her and she returned the gesture in kind. “Miss me?” he whispered into her ear. 

A slight coughing behind Eric made them pull apart from one another. “Caleb!” Tris exclaimed. She hadn’t been expecting to see her brother here, not after Natalie had explained that he wasn’t diviergent and that he’d betrayed them to Jeanine. 

“Hi, Beatrice,” Caleb said a bit awkwardly. He shifted from foot to foot and couldn’t look his sister in the eye. “Look, I know that mom told you about what I did, and I’m not going to pretend like there’s more to the story. I’m a shitty person, okay?”

“I just want to know why you’d betray your own mother like that,” Tris said coldly. 

“The only thing that I knew was that Erudite was supposed to be the smart faction, right?” Caleb said. “But all my life, I knew nothing but hearing about how bad and awful that Erudite was. I thought that it was mom and dad who were wrong, because there was no way that it could be Erudite who was wrong. So when mom told me about the simulation that I’d undergo and about a possible divergence, the only thing that I thought of was how wrong that she was. It was wrong to be divergent, and if I really was one, then I should be punished, because I was a monster. Which was why I ran off and joined Erudite. If anybody could figure out what was wrong with me and how to fix me, it would be Erudite.”

“What changed your opinion?” Tris asked after a moment of hesitation.

“Jeanine. She calls divergents monsters, but she’s the one who slaughters those who stand in her way,” Caleb said coldly. Tris felt a shiver of fear move up her spine. She wanted to think that he meant metaphorically, like how Jeanine destroyed reputations through her newspaper reports, but Tris knew that, given the chance, Jeanine would likely kill every last person in the room right now. 

The two siblings stared at one another, neither moving. The room was filled with the sounds of chit-chat as people waited to leave, but both of them felt like that was a world away. 

Caleb eventually looked towards the ground. “I know that saying I’m sorry won’t even begin to fix the things that my betrayal has caused,” he said. “And I know that working for our parents as an Erudite spy is not going to bring back the three divergents that Jeanine slaughtered because of my betrayal. But I’m hoping that somehow, when this is all over for me, that whatever is waiting on the other side will see how truly sorry that I am, and give me leniency.”

“I… I don’t know what you want from me, Caleb,” Tris said as she hugged herself. 

“I don’t know,” Caleb said quietly. “I suppose that I just wanted to see you. In Dauntless. How you are now. I know that it was a ruse to get into Erudite when I saw you the other month. I knew that you were on some fool’s errand for mom. A way for her to remind me of what I put at risk by betraying the divergents.”

“The part of me that remains Abnegation wants to forgive you, Caleb,” Tris started after a moment. “But the longer that I remain in Dauntless, the more I’m reminded that I am no longer in Abnegation. You are nothing but a selfish asswipe. And, quite frankly, I don’t think that all of the good karma in this life could possibly make up for the lives of divergents that Jeanine managed to track down and kill because of you.”

“Yes, you’re right. And I deserved to hear that. I… I’ll just leave you now.” Caleb turned to leave, and Tris turned back to Eric. 

“Are you okay?” Eric whispered into her ear. “I couldn’t hear what you were talking about, but you looked just about ready to murder him.”

“I’m fine,” Tris said tersely. “I don’t want to talk about it.” She looked around the room. “Not here.”

 

* * *

It took a few hours for most of Erudite, Abnegation, and Candor to leave safely for their homes, but eventually, the only people who remained were Natalie, Holly, and all of the Dauntless divergents. 

“Thank you all for remaining,” Natalie said. “Holly?”

“I think that we should have a meeting maybe in three days from now,” Holly said. “I know that these midnight meetings draw on the nerves, but it’s the easiest time for everybody to gather at once. And it will be more convenient for me to be able to draw blood from everybody at once, and then to run the tests as fast as I can. After all, wouldn’t you like to know right away if you’ve got microchips in your blood?” Everybody agreed quickly to that. “Then it’s settled then. I’ll smuggle in the things that I need between now and then, and I’ll see everybody in three days. I’m off to bed before I have to get up to go to school. Chao.” 

After the door had shut behind Holly, Natalie turned her attention back to the Dauntless. “I wanted to speak with you about training the rest of the divergents,” she said quietly. 

“Are we really looking at a war?” a man named George asked. 

“Why are you complaining? You’re the one who’s always going on about how unrealistic that paintball and laser-tag is,” a woman named Debby said with a sneer.

“Yes, but there’s a difference between using red paintballs and actually seeing somebody’s blood and brain splattered all over a wall,” George said. Tris thought that he might have been one of the patrol officers on duty the night that Lewis Cottle had been found.

“War is nasty business,” April spoke up. “But I’m one of the few people who would honestly say that I have complete faith in Natalie. Jeanine is not somebody that I want to mess with. I’m an old woman— I’ve lived my life. Jeanine can do what she wants with me. But what about Holly? She’s got three younger siblings, and we think that they might all be divergent. It’s the children who Jeanine will thoughtlessly slaughter that we’re going into war for.”

“It’s for us, too,” Eric spoke up. “Not only for Holly and her siblings, and all of us at the meeting today, but for the future of this city. What kind of a message are we sending to everybody else if we just sit by and let Jeanine pick us off, one-by-one?”

“It’s not like I want for this to happen,” Natalie said after a beat. “I have children, as all of you know.” She reached out for Tris, and Tris walked the few steps over to her mother and accepted her mom’s hands. “And I’m worried about what might happen to them. I know that they’re exceptionally tough, especially my Beatrice. But wars create a lot of graves.”

“But if a few lives is the price that we must pay in order for there to be peace in the city— real peace— then that’s a price that I’m willing to accept,” Debbie spoke up. 

“Here here!” several people said at once.

“Let’s look at the Dauntless armory, and figure out how we’re going to get guns away from there without too many people noticing,” April said. “And Natalie? We’re going to need a place of our own to store them.”

“I know a place,” Natalie said quickly. “Leave that to me.”

“Then, instead of having weekly meetings, we’ll have training sessions instead,” Eric went on. “We’ll come up with a schedule to make sure that everybody is given a chance to have basic gun training as well as hand-to-hand.”

Everybody started to talk at once about what they might do to help train the other divergents. 

“Okay, okay!” Natalie said after about thirty seconds of this. “I’ll let you guys deal with that on your own. Just tell me when, and I’ll manage the rest, like I normally do. April, you should head back first. Tris and Eric, I know that I normally talk with you, but it wouldn’t be weird at all if a leader and a leader-in-training were seen escorting the oldest Dauntless leader back home.”

Tris was wondering how they were going to be able to get April back to the Dauntless compound via the river, but Eric went over to a door and opened it. It was not how they’d arrived, and as the three of them walked into the damp hall, Tris realized that, of course April wouldn’t have come by the river, because she was old and couldn’t walk that well to begin with. 

They walked until they came out of the tunnel and into a vast cavern. It was lit from moonlight from holes in the ceiling, and as they walked through the cavern, Tris looked up and saw that there were the remains of some sort of beautiful mosaic on the ceiling. 

“Wow, where are we? What is this place?” Tris asked in complete awe.

“Long before we took over the city, this used to be an underground train station,” April explained. 

“But, all of our trains run above ground,” Tris said blankly. She felt stupid as the words came out of her mouth.

“They do… now,” April pointed out. 

They walked up some steps and came out in an alley that was near the main train station by the Dauntless compound. They hurried back into the Dauntless compound, and escorted April back to the pit. 

“And this is where I will now bid the two of you goodbye,” April said. “I would wish the two of you good night, but something tells me that you aren’t going to get much sleep tonight.” With one last saucy wink, April hobbled away down a different hall than Tris and Eric had to go down. 

“I swear to god, April,” Eric whispered once she was out of sight. 

“Forget about her,” Tris said as she pulled on Eric’s hand. “I’m tired.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, please let me know if you spotted any grammatical errors so that I can fix them.
> 
> And, like always, reviews and kudos are appreciated.


	14. Chapter 14

Eric and Tris trudged up to Eric’s apartment, and then they went straight to the bedroom. Tris flopped face-first onto Eric’s bed, and let out a loud groan that was equal parts frustration and exhaustion. 

“Hey hey, you know the rules; no shoes on the bed,” Eric said as he picked up Tris’s foot and started to pull on the laces of her boot. Once he’d tossed her boot onto the floor, he started in on the other. “Hey, are you asleep?”

“No,” Tris said, her voice muffled by the pillow. “Who can sleep with all of this stuff that’s running through my head?”

“The war? What you talked about with Caleb? Jeanine’s plan?”

“Yes,” Tris said. 

Eric dropped Tris’s other shoe onto the floor and went around to sit on his side of the bed while he took his own shoes off. “Do you want to talk about Caleb or something? What did he say to you?”

“He told me about some of his motivation towards betraying the divergent to Jeanine,” Tris said as she curled up onto her side and looked up at Eric. “He said that he felt guilty when she killed several divergents.”

“I’m sorry, I know that he’s your brother and everything, but honestly,” Eric spat out as he lay down next to Tris. “He ratted the divergents out to Jeanine and then what? What exactly did he expect would happen after that? He probably knew very well what her opinion on them was. How in the world could he have been surprised at all that she went around and killed the divergents after he told her about them?”

“I don’t know,” Tris said. She pressed herself closer to Eric and he half-turned to kiss her gently. “I’m scared, Eric. I didn’t sign up for a war.”

“You heard what everybody said at the meeting: nobody wants a war. We just want to live our lives,” Eric whispered against her lips. “I think that I’m just about as scared as you.”

“What? Don’t say that. You’re Eric Coulter; you’re not afraid of anything,” Tris said quickly. 

“I’m afraid of lots of things,” Eric protested.

“Like giant spiders?” Tris teased him. 

“Shut up, stiff,” Eric growled as he rolled on top of Tris. He took her arms and pinned them above her head, and then he kissed down the side of her throat. Tris tipped her head back a little to give him better access, and then let out a throaty groan when Eric’s knee rubbed against her crotch through her pants. 

Eric released her then and pulled away from her. Tris sat up and pulled her shirt off. “Are you sure?” Eric whispered. 

“I don’t want to have any regrets as I go into this war,” Tris replied as she reached back to unhook her bra. “Things that I should have done, but that I was too afraid to do.”

Eric pushed down the bra strap that covered part of the tattoo on her shoulder, and then kissed the ink that curled up and around her shoulder. “I don’t think that I ever saw your tattoo finished. You did get it finished, right?”

“Yes,” Tris agreed shyly. “Right after Al died.” She pulled her bra off completely, and then turned around on the bed to show Eric. 

“It suits you,” Eric said after getting a good look at it. “People expect for us to completely forget about our origins, but I don’t think that they understand that it’s not how people work. You were born in Abnegation, and even though you’re in Dauntless now, you’re still exceptionally selfless.”

He leaned over and kissed the grey Abnegation hands on Tris’s tattoo, and then he pulled Tris over until she lay with her head on his lap. He leaned over and kissed her before she sat up and moved to sit on his lap. 

Tris fisted her hands in the fabric of Eric’s shirt and then he pulled away from her to pull it off completely. There was a small tattoo with a bunch of seemingly random letters over his left breast. “EC” was on top, then “KC” in the middle, with “PC” on the bottom. 

“What does this mean?” Tris asked as she lightly trailed her fingers over the tattoo. 

“EC,” Eric whispered. “My little sister.”

“You have a sister?”

“Yeah. She’s in Erudite. Elizabeth. And then Katherine, my mom, and Patrick, my dad,” Eric finished.

“Are they still alive?”

“Yes. When Jeanine came to me, she threatened my family. It was the deciding factor in me joining Dauntless,” Eric said gently. “But I don’t want to talk about them. Not right now.”

“No,” Tris agreed. She kissed Eric. His hands moved up to gently touch her bare breasts. His thumbs brushed lightly over her nipples over and over until they were hard. 

Eric pulled away from Tris’s mouth and leaned down to put his lips around her nipple instead. Tris let out a throaty moan, and leaned back on her hands to give Eric better access. 

Eric released her nipple, gently picked Tris up and put her down on her back on the bed. He trailed his hands down her sides until he came to the top of her pants, and then he moved his hands to the center. Tris thought that he was going to unbutton her pants, but he just moved his hands up her stomach until he reached her breasts. 

He climbed up her and kissed her lips, her chin, her jaw, down her throat. He brought his knee up and started to rub at her crotch again, but then he started to finger her through her pants. His fingers were very skilled and he seemed to know exactly where to touch her that would draw forth the most breathy moans from her.

After about a minute of this, Tris was no longer quite as satisfied with his touch through her pants. She quickly undid the button and zipper, and she struggled to get her pants off from around her hips. 

Eric pulled away from her and helped to pull her pants off. Once he’d tossed them aside, he hooked his thumbs under the elastic band of her panties and pulled them off, too. 

Even though it was only just one little scrap of fabric, its absence left Tris feeling exceptionally vulnerable. Especially with the way that Eric was looking at her right now.

“Is it weird that I’m not feeling very brave right now?” Tris whispered as she tried to cover herself. 

“I suppose that it might be a little unnerving somebody’s first time,” Eric replied gently. “Do you want to stop?”

“I don’t want to stop,” Tris whispered hesitantly. It came out sounding more like a question. “But I’m scared.”

“Of what? Intimacy?”

“I don’t know,” Tris said quietly. 

“You are so beautiful,” Eric whispered. He leaned over and kissed her over and over. “I don’t want for you to be afraid.” He trailed open-mouthed kisses down her throat, between her breasts, down her stomach, and only stopped when he reached the patch of yellow-brown hair that grew over her crotch. 

He pulled away then, sat up, looked down at Tris. “I don’t want for you to feel like I’m pushing you into something that you’re not ready for. If you want me to stop, just say so. No matter what.”

“I don’t want you to stop,” Tris whispered, her voice barely audible. 

Eric gave a slight nod and bent down over Tris again. He gently pushed her legs apart, and she let him. He slowly ran his tongue up the length of her pussy, which was already pretty wet. Tris let out a heady moan at the contact, and she fisted her hands in the sheets. 

The salty-sweet juices of Tris’s arousal dripped from her vagina, and Eric greedily lapped them up. Then, he moved up and started to suckle on her clit. 

“Oh my god,” Tris gasped. She’d never felt anything like this at all. It was simultaneously the best and worst feeling that Tris had ever experienced in her life. Even though she was afraid of the sensations that washed over her like waves, she also never wanted for the feeling to stop. 

The waves got more and more intense. Tris thought that she was going to drown in the feelings that Eric was making her experience, and this was only just with his mouth. She felt like she was about to cry because of the intensity of her feelings. 

And then the waves really did wash over Tris’s head and she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t control her body as it spasmed. She thought for certain that she was dying for real, but at the same time, she’d never felt more alive.

When Tris came down from her high, she realized that Eric was lying next to her again. He brushed some strands of her hair away from her face, and then gently kissed her chin. 

“Wha-” Tris tried to ask. She felt completely boneless.

Eric laughed a little, but not unkindly. “Come on, Tris. I know that they wouldn’t exactly encourage sex ed in Abnegation, but you mean to tell me that you don’t know what an orgasm is?”

“We never had any sex ed, period,” Tris said.

“Well then, I guess that I’ll just have to put on my Erudite mortarboard and teach you,” Eric whispered. He kissed her on the lips. Tris found the taste of her down arousal a bit off-putting at first, but the longer they continued to kiss, the more she got used to it.

Eric pulled away from her and looked her in the eye. “Are you okay?”

“It was amazing,” Tris said. “I want to feel like that all the time.”

“You’d go crazy,” Eric said with a laugh. He gently kissed her chin. 

“Yes, probably,” Tris agreed with a wistful sigh. “And I would probably get used to it after a while. But I know that I want to feel like that again.”

“I’m more than happy to supply you with an endless supply of orgasms,” Eric said. He kissed her deeply again. “Tell me how much that you know so that I can educate you. Hands-on education, that is.”

“I know that the penetrative part hurts,” Tris said.

“It only hurts the first time, and most women say that it feels more like a… slight pinch.”

“I’m disturbed that you know that, and I don’t what to know who you asked about that,” Tris said.

“I’m still very much Erudite, and I have a thirst for knowledge,” Eric explained simply. “And the way that girls sometimes talked about how much that it hurt made me afraid that I was going to hurt… my partner.”

Tris nodded slightly before she sat up and started to undo Eric’s belt. “I want to see you now.”

Eric let her undo his button and zipper, and then he pushed up with his feet so that he could pull his pants off. Tris helped him to get them off, like he’d done for her a few minutes ago. 

His cock strained against the dark material of his boxer-briefs. Curiosity to understand Eric’s foreign, male anatomy overtook Tris’s fear, and she quickly pushed his boxers off until he was naked as well.

The sight was alien and yet completely natural at the same time. Tris climbed up onto Eric’s lap, but he stopped her from penetrating herself on his dick.

“Wait,” he said quickly. “I need a condom.”

“Do you have one?” Tris asked. How stupid could she be? She didn’t want to become pregnant right now. 

“Yes,” Eric agreed. “Get off me.” Tris obliged, and Eric twisted over to reach his nightstand. He pulled out a box from the first drawer, and then pulled out a condom. 

“Why do you have those?”

“I bought then right after you became a full Dauntless member,” Eric said. Tris gave him a surprised look. “What? Can’t a guy have hopes?”

“No, I’m just surprised,” Tris said quickly. “And relieved, because I completely forgot about protection.”

“I’d hardly expect for you to remember,” Eric said gently as he ripped open the package and pulled the condom out. “After all, you didn’t even know what an orgasm was.”

“That isn’t fair. There’s a difference between a condom and an orgasm,” Tris protested. She watched curiously as Eric rolled the condom over his penis. 

Eric picked Tris up and put her down so that her head was on a pillow. “You can still tell me to stop. At any time.”

“We’ve gone this far, and I want to do this now,” Tris said firmly. Eric slowly moved into her, and Tris’s face pulled into a weird look of discomfort.

“Are you okay?” Eric asked quickly.

“It feels weird,” Tris said. She tried to move into a more comfortable position, and then they both groaned loudly at the friction that her movement created.

Eric slowly started to push in and out of her. “Oh, oh yes. That’s really great. It’s a lot better now that I’ve gotten used to it. It’s not as great as what you were doing with your tongue earlier, but it’s a pretty close second.”

“I’ve barely even gotten started,” Eric started as he gave Tris a cocky smile. He gripped Tris’s hips tightly, lifted her up for a better angle, and then he started to roughly pound into her.

Tris was barely able to think as the sensations bombarded her. It was like the wave sensation earlier, except different in a way that was completely wonderful. She whimpered and fisted her hands in the sheets again. 

Eric stilled. “What? Don’t stop,” Tris complained. 

“Wrap your legs around my waist,” Eric ordered. “And put your arms around my neck.” Tris did as he asked of her. Eric moved against her, and Tris understood why the change of position: it allowed them to be even closer than before. 

Tris gasped loudly as Eric hit something inside of her that was painful, but somehow pleasurable at the same time. She dug her nails into the skin on Eric’s back since she couldn’t reach the sheets without letting go of him. Eric kissed her lips, her cheeks, her chin, her jaw. 

One of Eric’s hands was braced on the bed by Tris’s head. The other one was still on her hip, and his fingers dug slightly into the flesh there. “Tris,” Eric whispered against her lips. She tilted her head a little and kissed him again. 

With every thrust Eric made into her, Tris felt like the waves were just starting to wash over her. Rather than to be afraid of the feeling, Tris now embraced it with open arms and welcomed it. She tipped her head back, and just tried to focus on the sensations that were building up inside of her.

At any second the wave would…

Eric stilled and let out a loud groan into Tris’s shoulder. “What?” Tris gasped, annoyed at his poor timing. “Why did you stop?”

“I’m sorry, Tris,” Eric whispered into the side of her neck. “I came. I tried to hold out until you were at least close to your orgasm, but it’s been too long for me.”

“I was really close,” Tris whined. 

Eric fell backwards and took Tris with him, but he remained inside of her. Then, he pushed her into an upright position. Without breaking eye contact from Tris, Eric slowly started to circle his thumb around her clit. 

In the few seconds of Eric having his own orgasm and the resulting conversation, Tris’s approaching orgasm had died down a little bit. It took a moment for Eric to build Tris back up again. She slowly started to rotate her hips over Eric’s cock; even though he was only semi-erect now, it still felt amazing inside of her. 

But then Tris’s orgasm crashed down around her. She closed her eyes, her head tipped back, and she just let it happen. She was a little bit more aware of what was happening to her this time around, and felt Eric wrap his arms around her and lie her back down on the bed again. 

Tris opened her eyes after a moment, and looked at Eric. He brushed more hair away from her forehead. “Are you okay?” he whispered.

“Yeah,” Tris replied. She frowned at him. “But you’re an ass, though.”

“I said I was sorry, and I made it up to you,” Eric said quickly. Tris gave him a disgusted look. “…Right?” He leaned over and kissed her. Tris wrapped her arms around him again and kissed him back.

“Yeah,” she agreed rather reluctantly. “But you owe me another— uninterrupted— orgasm.”

“Yes,” Eric said quickly. Tris heaved an exhausted sigh and snuggled in closer to Eric. 

“But not right now. It’s so late it’s early, and we have to go to work tomorrow,” she whispered. 

“Yes,” Eric agreed. “Get some sleep now.”

 

* * *

“Are you okay, Tris?” Christina asked as the two of the moved through the line to get their breakfast. “You’ve been yawning an awful lot this morning, and there are some big-ass bags under your eyes.”

“Gee, thanks,” Tris said dryly.

“I mean, you look as beautiful as ever, even when you look super shitty,” Christina backtracked. Tris just gave her an exhausted glare.

“I’ve been super stressed out because of work and then Eric and I-” Tris broke off and her eyes went wide as she realized what she’d just been about to say.

“What did you do?” Christina hissed. 

“Nothing, nothing!” Tris said quickly. She felt her face heating up.

“Oh my god!” Christina gasped. She grabbed Tris’s wrist and dragged her out of the dining hall. “Oh my god!” she repeated once they were alone. “You guys had sex, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but keep your voice down!” Tris hissed. 

“Wowwow,” Christina exclaimed. “What was it like?”

“Really weird, but really amazing at the same time,” Tris said as a blissful smile spread over her face. Christina punched her in the arm and bit into the muffin that she’d snagged. 

“Look at you, all smiling and shit. What about his penis? How big was it?”

“I don’t… I don’t have anything to compare it to,” Tris stammered out with a slight shake of her head.

“Well, was it as long as your forearm?”

“I don’t know; I honestly didn’t look that much at it,” Tris said. Her face felt like it was on fire.

“Was he able to fit all of it inside of you?”

“No,” Tris said slowly after a moment of hesitation. Christina let out a squeal of excitement.

“But how does it feel now, though?”

“I’m sore in really weird places,” Tris said as she scrunched her nose up. “Eric said that it was normal to feel like that, though, and said that I only needed to be worried if I for-real hurt or if it lasted for a really long time.”

“This is so cool, though,” Christina whispered. “The first in our group to become a real adult.”

“I think that we became real adults as soon as we became full Dauntless members,” Tris said. “But thanks for considering the loss of our virginities as part of becoming an adult,” she went on rather sarcastically. 

“Will doesn’t want to do anything. The only time that we sleep in the same bed is when I invite myself over for the night,” Christina said. “He never says anything about that, and just lets me do whatever I want. But when I ask him to stay the night at my place, suddenly he’s got meetings and shit in the morning and he needs his rest. Every freaking time. I think that he has some intimacy issues or something.”

“Just give him time, okay?” Tris reassured her friend. “Everybody moves at their own pace, and, let’s face it: adult relationships can be very scary to think about.”

“But we’re in Dauntless! You’d think that relationships here would be all about jumping in feet first and not looking back or regretting anything.”

“Relationships are not like playing paintball, Christina,” Tris said with a roll of her eyes. “And having sex with somebody isn’t something that you should take lightly. Sure things are a lot safer with things like condoms, birth control pills, and medication to stop the spread of STIs, but pregnancy and STIs are still something that everybody should be worried about.”

“Gosh, you sound like one of those Erudite safe sex pamphlets that they had in the nurse’s office at school,” Christina said with a roll of her eyes. 

“I’m being serious, Christina,” Tris protested. “Choosing to have sex isn’t something that anybody should take lightly. Just give Will time, let don’t try to force him, or else he might leave you.”

Christina pressed her lips together and considered Tris’s words for a moment. “Yeah, you’re right. I just never thought that I’d be taking advice from a former stiff.”

“It’s the former that’s the keyword,” Tris said as she playfully hit Christina on the arm.

“Hey, speaking of paintball,” Christina said as she punched Tris right back. “Some people have been talking about getting up some teams of paintball. You and Eric in?”

“I don’t know,” Tris said slowly. For a few seconds, she’d been able to forget all about the upcoming war against Jeanine and Erudite and just pretend like her biggest stress was her training to be a Dauntless leader. But the thought of paintballing, which was already pretty war-like, snapped Tris back to reality. “We’re both really busy with meetings and such. And we’ve got the meeting with the other factions coming up soon.”

“Oh come on. I hardly ever see you anymore,” Christina complained. “We’re both always so busy. Just take a few hours out from whatever it is that you and Eric do when you get off from work and come out with us. Just for an hour or so.”

“I don’t know,” Tris said hesitantly. She really didn’t want to play paintball, but she also really didn’t want to disappoint Christina. Especially not after Christina had pointed out that they never got much opportunity to see one another anymore. “I’ll have to-”

“Tris!” April called out from the other end of the hall. “I’ve been looking for you. Where’s your boytoy? We need to talk schedules.”

“I left him in the dining hall, and I haven’t seen him come out,” Tris explained. She mentally breathed a sigh of relief. She would be able to put Christina off now because of April, and hopefully, her friend would forget all about it the next time that they saw one another. 

“Well, come on then,” April insisted. “Let’s go find him. We all have a meeting at ten.”

“What? Nobody told me this,” Tris protested as she followed after the older leader. 

“It’s our quarterly, before-the-big-faction-meeting review,” April explained. “You know, because none of us can be bothered to remember the leaders of the other factions, let alone their obnoxious spouses or their sticky crotchfruit. We have one before every- There he is. ERIC!” Her already overly-loud voice carried over the noise of the dining hall. All eyes were on the two of them. “Times a-wasting, honey! Tick-tick, you’re on the clock now!”

Eric said something to the others that he was sitting with and then stood. When he got over to April and Tris, he handed Tris a bran muffin. “Because Christina dragged you away from the line, and now it looks like we’re going to cut our breakfast short.”

“Thanks,” Tris said before she took a big bite from it. She was starving. Illicit midnight gatherings and 3 AM sexy times sure worked up an appetite. 

They walked across the compound and over to the Dauntless leader offices. April hustled them into her office. It was dark in there, and April turned her desk lap on to give the room a little bit more light. There were dark curtains that hung in the windows— Tris had always wondered about it, but now she understood why. 

“Since we’re the Dauntless leaders, it should be up to us to come up with the training schedule. Eric, how many initiates did you train this year?”

Eric had to think about it for a second. “Nine,” Tris supplied. “But then Edward got stabbed in the eye and he and Myra left. And then Al died, so at the end, it was six.”

“Nine,” April said slowly. “Was that a very large class? Could you manage a group of ten?”

“Easily,” Eric said. 

“I know that you don’t have any experience teaching, but do you think that you could also manage a group of ten on your own?” April asked Tris next.

“Yes,” Tris said without hesitation. It didn’t seem that hard, and she knew that Eric would help her out if she really got stuck.

“Okay, we need to brainstorm how we can get the guns to Natalie,” April said next.

“Well, I was thinking about it…” Eric started.

 

* * *

“…And we appreciate the efforts that Dauntless is going through to help us to clean up the city,” Andrew finished. Tris honestly hadn’t been paying much attention, and by the dry looks on all of the Dauntless leader’s faces, including April’s, she wasn’t the only one. She’d instead been focused on watching the movements that her father made as he gave his presentation on litter in the city. 

Everybody clapped politely as Andrew took his seat. “Ugh, how much longer?” Tris whispered to Eric under her breath. 

“Abnegation always go last, but you should know that already,” Eric said. “So unless there isn’t any other business, that should be it.” He rolled his eyes. “Thankfully.”

The only other person in the room who was older than April was an old judge in Candor. He stood up and looked around at the other people who were gathered in the big meeting room. “Is there any other business this quarter? Erudite? You passed on your chance to present business earlier. Would you like to speak now?”

“No thank you,” Jeanine said curtly. “We’re working within the other factions to help make their lives much easier. Our only business right now is on an individual basis with the factions.”

“Alight,” he said as he looked around the room at the other factions. “Anybody else?” When nobody spoke up, he picked up his gavel and brought it down on the sound block. “Then the meeting is adjourned.” 

“Thank god,” Tris groaned as everybody moved to get up. But rather than leave, everybody started to talk with one another, and greeted the other faction leaders like old friends. “Are we not leaving now?” she asked Eric.

“No, we normally stay and socialize a bit with the other faction leaders,” Eric said. 

“Mr. Coulter,” Andrew said as he walked over to where Eric and Tris were still sitting. Eric jumped to his feet and shook Andrew’s hand.

“Mr. Prior,” Eric said. 

“It is a pleasure to see you again,” Andrew said. He turned to Tris and offered her a brilliant smile. “And welcome to the Faction Leader’s Meeting, Ms. Prior. I hope that you weren’t too horribly bored.”

“I was, but this wasn’t my first super boring meeting,” Tris said honestly. “It was just the longest.” Andrew laughed a little. 

“April and Daniel are together again,” Max said as he walked over to the three of them. “We really should pull them apart before midnight this time around.” Tris looked around the room and saw April sitting in a corner with the old judge from Candor. 

“Oh lord, let’s go nip this in the bud right now,” Eric said. “Sorry, Mr. Prior. We don’t want to be here all night again.” Eric and Max left, which left Tris awkwardly with her dad.

“How is… um… your wife?” Tris asked hesitantly. She hated the fact that she could no longer acknowledge her father as being her father.

“She’s as well as to be expected,” Andrew said carefully. 

“That’s good,” Tris said with a slight nod of her head. She offered her father an awkward smile and he returned it. 

“I’m going to go talk with some of the other leaders. It was nice to meet you, Ms. Prior,” Andrew said before he left. Tris let out an annoyed huff of air and looked around the room. 

“The first time is always the hardest,” April said from behind Tris.

“Huh?” Tris said as she spun around.

“The first time that you publicly see your family after joining another faction is always the hardest,” April elaborated. She motioned over towards Daniel. “He is my brother. We grew up together, played together, knew everything that there was to know about one another. But he picked Candor and I picked Dauntless, and here we are. It wasn’t so bad at first, because I was a leader in training, and he was just some office clerk. But once he became a judge and got on a seat on the Candor council, we started to see one another at these quarterly meetings. We hadn’t seen each other in a good twenty years. And do you wanna know what we did the first time that we saw one another?”

“What?”

“We completely ignored one another, because society had taught us that faction was more important than some silly thing like sibling relationships. We continued to ignore one another at the meetings for another five years, until one day, I just said ‘fuck it! He’s my brother, and nobody’s going to stop me from talking to him!’. So I did. And here we are now.” April patted Tris on the shoulder. “One of these days, you’ll eventually come to the conclusion that nobody really gives a damn what you do so long as it doesn’t hurt people. Me catching up with my brother during these quarterly meetings doesn’t hurt anybody— not really. Your father is one of the Abnegation leaders. But at least you spoke with him. You’re already proving to be much braver than I was the first time I stared across the room at Daniel.”

She shuffled away and Tris looked around the room to find out where Eric had gotten to. She found her father, talking with some other Candor leaders. Their eyes caught and he made a slight motion with his cup at Tris before he returned his attention back to the people that he was talking with. 

“The Dauntless leaders are all ready to leave now,” Eric said from behind Tris. 

“Good,” she said as she turned to leave. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, please let me know if you spotted any grammatical errors so that I can fix them.
> 
> And, like always, reviews and kudos are appreciated.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is another suicide in this chapter. Just FYI.  
> *  
> It's been very difficult for me to get back into the swing of this story since July... and I apologize for that. I finally told myself that I was not allowed to work on ANYTHING else until I'd finished at least another chapter! And... would you look at that, I did!

Tris paced back and forth amongst the first group of her students. Eric had given her all of the Erudite divergents, on the assumption that their intelligence would make teaching them a little bit easier. 

It had only been a few months earlier that Tris had been in the same place where her students were now, but the circumstances couldn’t possibly be more different. There wasn’t going to be any fear serum or fear landscapes for these people. It was all very well and good to learn how to remain calm during stressful situations, but battling metaphorical crows or trains or whatever wasn’t exactly going to help anybody during the very real war that was looming. 

Tris had thought that there was only just the one room under the city, but she’d been wrong. Under the city where she’d grown up and now, thanks to her training to become a Dauntless leader, she knew almost as well as the back of her hand, there was an entire other city. It was a complete maze; one could easily become lost down there if they didn’t know where the exits were. There were dozens of other rooms that were perfect places to store the guns and ammo that the Dauntless divergents had been sneaking out from the compound since the midnight meeting a week ago, and other rooms that were the right size for teaching people hand-to-hand combat or how to work a gun. 

They had agreed that the bullets were too precious to want to waste on target practice, so they would use paintballs instead. It wasn’t nearly as good at firing an actual gun, but it was the next best thing. 

The room that Tris and her current batch of Erudite students were in wasn’t ideal, either. They had neither desks nor chairs, so instead, they just sat on the floor as they stripped and reassembled their guns. 

Eric had been right— the Erudite were very bright and picked up on everything right away. Some of them even pointed out ways that the others could do something better— something that not even Tris had known about. If there was one thing that Tris enjoyed about teaching the Erudite, it was that they loved to share their knowledge. When somebody figured out how to do something better, they shared it with everybody else. 

The door opened and Andrew came in. Tris hadn’t seen him around, but she figured that he approved of what his wife was doing. After all, he hadn’t exactly protested the night that she and Eric had shown up at their house, and he’d gone without comment to go tell of their Abnegation neighbors in the middle of the night. 

“How’s it going?” he asked her.

“Good, they’re really catching on,” Tris said. “I’m going to get some paintball guns for their next lesson.”

“Good, good,” Andrew said with a slight nod of his head. “I don’t think that Eric’s group of Candors is catching on nearly as fast, but your group is Erudite.”

“Was there something that you needed?” Tris asked. She eyed the piece of paper in her father’s hand.

“Yes, actually. Can you spare a second?”

“Behave,” Tris said to the group. She knew that they would, because they loved to learn more than anything else. She and Andrew walked out into the hall, which was dark. But Tris figured that he knew what he wanted to tell her about without reading the paper.

“Holly finished doing the testing on your blood sample,” Andrew started. Tris’s heart started to hammer. How bad would this be? “While she didn’t find any microchips in anybody’s blood, she was a bit concerned over the large amounts of materials used to make the microchips in your blood. She said that it’s perfectly normal to find it in Dauntless members, but she said that some of the numbers were quite high. Yours was the highest.”

“Mine?” Tris asked.

“Yes. I think that it has something to do with the fact that you’re the youngest full-Dauntless member,” Andrew said. “Holly said that you shouldn’t worry too much about it, since the things by themselves aren’t overly dangerous, or even toxic. Beatrice, are you alright? You look awfully pale.”

“Yes, I’m fine,” Tris said absently. “Do you know where Eric is right now? I need to talk to him.”

“You’ve been spending a lot of time with him recently, even when you’re not on the clock as a Dauntless leader,” Andrew said. “Is he your boyfriend or something?”

“Yes,” Tris said hesitantly. 

“Are you using protection?”

“Oh my god, DAD!” Tris shrieked. She felt her face heat up. “There are just some things that you shouldn’t ask your children, and that is one of them!”

“Is it really that weird to ask my daughter if she’s having safe sex?” Andrew countered. “I don’t want you to get hurt or to end up with an unwanted pregnancy.”

“I’m not having this conversation with you,” Tris said as she turned to go back into the room. “If that’s all, I need to get back to my students, now.” She went back into the room and then leaned up against the other side of the door. Her face was still super hot and her heart was hammering with her embarrassment. 

“Are you okay, Tris?” one of the girls asked. “Your face is all red.”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Tris said. 

 

* * *

When Tris had finished teaching for the day, she went to the Dauntless compound and then straight to the dining hall. She found Eric there already, talking and laughing with some of their friends. “I need to talk to you,” she said as she approached him. 

“Hey Tris, where have you been?” Zeke asked.

“Working,” Tris said without hesitation, and then turned her attention back to Eric. “Now.” 

Eric gave her an annoyed look, but stood up and followed her out into the hall. “Is this about the report?” Eric asked.

“Maybe… somebody didn’t tell you about my own report, but he said that there was a lot of stuff in my blood,” Tris whispered.

“What? What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” Tris snapped. “He said that I shouldn’t worry about it because it’s not dangerous on its own, but I’m sort of freaking out right now.” 

Eric grabbed Tris’s wrist and lead her over to their building. Once they were in his apartment, he looked to her. “Okay, spill.” Tris told him everything that her dad had told her earlier. 

“I don’t think that this is a very good thing, though,” Eric said once she’d finished. “It only proved that Jeanine has been trying to get the microchips to remain in the blood, but she didn’t have it quite right before the initiation period. She puts a pause on all of the experiments that she oversees in order to oversee the initiates instead. It would explain why there’s more stuff in your blood than in mine. And it would also explain why she’s only apparently just come up with microchips in the serum that don’t dissolve.” He looked at her. “But this isn’t news, not to you or anybody else.”

Tris moved against him and he hugged her tight. “But aside from that, how are you? How are your students?” he asked.

“They’re all doing really well. I wish that we could use real guns, but I also understand why we’re not,” Tris said. She looked up at Eric. “You?”

“They’re doing okay. They’re never going to pass Dauntless initiation, but they don’t need to, so it doesn’t matter,” Eric said. “Are we done having a private discussion now? Because I’d barely sat down when you showed up and I’m starving.”

On cue, Tris’s stomach gave a loud growl. “I’m hungry, too,” she said. “Sorry, this was very upsetting to me.”

“I’m just glad that it’s only just an excess of the materials rather than the actual microchips,” Eric said. He pulled away from Tris but didn’t remove his arm from around her waist. They left the apartment and headed back to the dining hall. 

“Is everything okay?” Uriah asked when they got back to the table. “You guys were gone for a while.”

“Sorry, I was having a bit of a crisis,” Tris said. 

“And Eric reassured you? For half an hour?” Marlene asked dryly. 

“With his penis?” Zeke asked while keeping a perfectly straight face. Eric, who’d just settled into his seat again, stood up and picked up his tray. 

“Hey, come on! He’s joking!” Uriah protested. 

“We’re going to go eat elsewhere, with less crass people,” Eric said.

“You settle where you want to sit and I’ll go get something for myself,” Tris said. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the conversation with her dad, but it still left Tris’s face feeling over-heated. 

 

* * *

Eric brushed away some strands of hair that were stuck to Tris’s forehead with sweat. She offered him a sated smile, and snuggled closer to him. The room was silent, and filled with the lingering scent of sex. 

“You’re still worried about Holly’s report,” Eric said after a long stretch of silence. 

“Of course I am,” Tris snapped at him. “It’s been on my mind ever since my dad told me!”

“Holly might look young— and this is because she is young— but she is very smart. If she says that the amount of materials in your blood isn’t going to hurt you, then I believe her. But if you’re really that worried about it, you should go talk to Norma and get some blood work done. But I assure you that she’s only going to tell you the same thing that Holly said through your father: that you have nothing to worry about, because on their own, they’re harmless.”

“I trust you and I trust Holly,” Tris said slowly after a moment. “And I don’t want for anybody to become suspicious if I go in to get blood work done and there’s nothing overly wrong with me from the get-go. I’ll try and catch Holly and talk to her about it, though.”

“That’s the spirit,” Eric said before he leaned in and kissed her. Tris snuggled even closer to him before she moved to straddle his hips. “You’re always very eager. It’s barely been a minute. I’ve created a monster.”

“Yes, but you’ve never exactly discouraged me, either,” Tris said between kisses. “And you always bounce back quickly enough.”

“That’s because you’re always so beautiful and eager; I don’t want to disappoint you!” Eric whispered as he nuzzled into her neck. He reached up to cup her bare breasts, and she thrust her chest forward into his hands and…

And somebody knocked roughly on the front door.

“For fuck’s sake! It’s only eleven!” Eric hissed as Tris got off of him. She started to get dressed on the assumption that she was going to have to go and deal with some other suicide or something. Eric only paused long enough to pull his pants back on, sans underwear. 

“What?” he snapped at whoever had knocked on the door.

“There’s… a strange incident on the roof,” the man said. “It’s pretty much bypassed the regular officers at this point. Nobody knows what to do.”

“Tris, get out here! Bring my shoes!” Eric yelled. Tris picked up Eric’s boots and his shirt, both of which were by the door to the bedroom, and ran out to the front room. 

“What’s going on?” Tris asked as they hurried from the apartment. 

“She’s just standing on the edge of the compound’s roof,” the man explained. “She keeps saying the same thing over and over.”

They got onto the elevator and the man pressed the button for the top floor. Tris knew that, while there were doors up onto the roof in all of the buildings, most of them were kept locked because too many people were throwing themselves off of the roof. However, a locked door was no deterrent to most people, and they kept going up there anyway.

“The officers who responded to the report tried to talk with her, but she just kept saying the same thing over and over,” the man went on as the elevator lurched upward.

Eric had gone over to lean against the wall to put his shoes on, but he looked up at Tris as the man said that. Tris’s stomach dropped, and it had nothing to do with their ride in the elevator.

The elevator stopped on the top floor, and they got off and ran down the hall to an unmarked door. Eric pulled his shirt on as they went. The man pulled out a key ring and unlocked the door. There was a staircase on the other side, and they all ran up it. The door at the top of the stairs opened up onto the compound’s roof.

“She’s over here,” the man said. They ran over to the other side of the compound, near to where the hole that the transfer initiates had jumped down after the choosing ceremony.

Except that the lady wasn’t standing near where the giant airbag was. There was only just the ground, several feet below her. A jump from that height would kill.

Some patrol officers were circled around her, ready to grab her if she tried to jump. 

“It will be your death. It will be your death. It will be your death,” the woman was saying over and over without infliction. 

Eric and Tris exchanged a worried look before they walked over to the line of officers.

“How long has she been like this,” Eric whispered to them.

“We got the call about fifteen minutes ago,” one of the officers explained. “We haven’t been able to communicate with her. No matter what any of us do or say, she always just says the same thing over and over. No infliction, and she’s barely even blinking.”

“What should we do?” Tris whispered to Eric as Steve ran over towards where they were standing. 

“Approach on all sides, and try to grab her before she knows what’s going on,” Eric said simply. He motioned for some of the officers to go around the lady’s other side, and they all crept closer and closer to her.

The lady stopped speaking and spun around to look at the group. “Programing complete,” she said before she took a step backwards. 

“SHIT!” Eric cursed as everybody ran over to the edge. The woman let out a piercing scream. Tris couldn’t look and turned her head away to avoid having to watch the woman splatter onto the ground below. 

“FUCK!” Eric screamed at the top of his lungs. He spun away from the edge of the roof, grabbed Tris’s arm, and walked her away from the others a bit. 

“Go back to my apartment. Get the key to the meeting room and go,” Eric whispered into her ear. Tris knew that he didn’t mean the meeting rooms that the leaders used. He wanted for her to go and tell her mom what had happened. 

“What about her?” Tris asked.

“I’ll take care of it. Just go,” Eric said. Tris ran off towards the door that they’d come out from about a minute ago. The door at the bottom of the stairs was still unlocked, but Tris didn’t think too much of it. She had to get down to the meeting room, change into her old Abnegation dress, and go tell her mother. 

There was absolutely no doubt in her mind whatsoever that this was a prelude to an attack. 

Once she was back in Eric’s apartment, she took a moment to redo the laces on her boots properly. She knew that there were other entrances, even the one in the old, underground train station, but she wasn’t quite certain that she would be able to find it again. And the one along the river was the quickest. 

Tris tried to push the growing panic to the back of her mind as she walked along the river. She was more used to the trek now, but it was still very dangerous.

Before Tris knew it, she was standing at the grate that opened up into the park near her home. It was the same one that she and Eric had come out from the other night when Lewis had shot himself.

Before Tris left the relative safety of the tunnel, she reached up and touched her bra, where she’d put her gun. It created a bit of a weird lump over her chest, but it felt reassuring to Tris just to have it. She opened up the grate and stepped out.

Tris smoothed out her dress and started to walk slowly with her head down. She couldn’t run without drawing attention to herself, even though she was feeling exceptionally exposed and vulnerable right now. At least when they’d come the other night, Eric had been with her. They’d just been a couple, sneaking out for an illicit, midnight stroll. Now, she was somebody who was breaking the rules with no obvious excuse. 

Tris didn’t think that she’d be able to actually make it back to her parent’s house without being stopped by patrol officers or even just other people. But nobody was around, and she didn’t even hear anybody moving around at all. 

This time, Tris went to the doormat and used the spare key that her parents kept under there to let herself in. She paused outside of her parent’s room, but eventually knocked urgently on the door.

The response was instantaneous, not like Tris had been expecting anything different. After all, Andrew and Natalie were the only people in the house right now; somebody should not have been knocking on their bedroom door.

Andrew came out, but he relaxed when he saw his daughter. “Beatrice,” he said. “What happened?”

“We’ve had another incident, and there’s no doubt in our minds that Jeanine had her hands all over this,” Tris said. She quickly told her parents about what had happened. 

“This is very serious,” Natalie said once Tris had finished. “What is Eric going to do with the body?”

“I don’t know; he didn’t say, but we were surrounded by Dauntless at the time,” Tris said with a slight shake of her head. 

“You should head back to Dauntless now,” Natalie said. “Use a different entrance than the one that you came out from. We’ll follow along in a moment.”

 

* * *

When Tris got back to the main meeting room in the underground tunnels, she was no longer alone. Two of the Dauntless divergents, Chad and Ryan, stood by the table. A body bag had been set onto the table, and there was no doubt in Tris’s mind who was in it. 

“Why did you bring that here?” Tris said as she walked over to the closet. 

“Eric said to,” Chad said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Where have you been?”

“I went to go tell my parents about this,” Tris said. “I’m going to change now, unless you think that I’ll have to go back in Abnegation again?” Chad gave her an open-palmed go-ahead gesture, so Tris slipped into the closet so that she could change. As she did so, she heard another door open, and then voices.

“Is this the jumper?” Natalie asked. 

“Yes,” Chad agreed. “Eric put on some Erudite clothing, smeared makeup all over his tattoos, and went to go get Holly. I don’t know why this couldn’t have waited until morning. It’s not like she’s going to be able to get the equipment.”

“She may not be able to get the equipment that her father works on, but we’ve smuggled a microscope here, a scalpel there down here,” Natalie said. Tris stepped out from the room, and her parents looked over to her briefly. “We know how she died; we don’t need an autopsy to figure that out. What we need to know is what caused her to do all of that.”

“Tris, you said that the other guy was a volunteer for the new batch of serum,” Ryan said as he looked over to her. “How about her?”

“Sorry, I only saw the first batch,” Tris said. “I knew that they were going to be going over to Erudite on certain days, but I didn’t see any of the volunteers. You’d have to ask April or Eric about that. Actually, Eric would probably know, because he’s the go-between for Erudite and Dauntless.”

“Ugh, it’s leaking,” Natalie complained. “Get her off of the table. Holly will just have to do her work somewhere else.” Ryan and Chad picked up the body bag and Natalie lead them from the room. 

“I wish that there were better circumstances for us having so many run-ins,” Andrew said to his daughter once they were alone. “But it really is great to see you, Beatrice. I was really upset when you decided to join Dauntless, but I’m really proud of you, honey.”

“Thanks,” Tris said carefully. “I wish that there were better circumstances, too. It makes the litter pick-up program presentation seem tons better by comparison.”

Andrew looked over to the table, where some blood had leaked through the bag and onto the table. It was slowly dripping onto the floor. “We should get this cleaned up, but I don’t want for Eric and Holly to get here and not know where your mother went off to with the body. I’ll go get some cleaning supplies; you stay here.”

Tris waited about a minute, and then her dad came back with some rags and buckets of soapy water. They’d started to clean up the mess when Eric and Holly came into the room. 

“Where’s the body? I specifically told them to bring it here,” Eric snapped. 

“It was making a mess, and Natalie was upset over that,” Andrew explained. “I’ll take you to it, Holly.” He threw his blood-soaked rag down into the bucket, and he and Holly left the room. 

“You didn’t have to snap at him,” Tris said as she kept scrubbing at a chair that had gotten some blood on it. 

“Yes, you’re right. I’m just completely on edge tonight,” Eric said as he rubbed the bridge of his nose with his index finger and thumb. 

“We all are,” Tris said. She dropped her own rag into the bucket too, and went over to Eric. “My hands are covered in blood, so just kiss me instead.” Eric leaned down and gave Tris an open-mouthed kiss. 

They only pulled apart when Andrew cleared his throat behind them. “Get out of here. With Chad and Ryan here now, there’s no reason for the two of you to stay.”

“Alright,” Tris agreed. Tris went out the door that lead to the river to wash her hands while Eric changed out from the Erudite clothes. 

“You owe me a kiss,” Eric whispered once they’d started back to the Dauntless compound. 

“I think that I owe you a lot of things, and a kiss is just the PG version,” Tris said cheekily. 

When they got back to Eric’s apartment, Tris went straight to the bathroom to wash up better with soap. 

“There’s just something very disturbing about watching somebody die,” Eric said as he watched Tris scrub her hands. “Makes me want to have rough, passionate sex with you.”

“That’s a lot of our sex, thus far,” Tris said as she shook the water off from her hands and went to dry them off. Eric crossed over to her and roughly kissed her. Tris eagerly returned his kiss, and fisted her hands in the fabric of his shirt. 

Eric pressed Tris up against the counter, and pulled her shirt off. Tris tugged on Eric’s shirt, and he helped her to pull it off. Then, he bent down and lightly licked at the swell of Tris’s breast that was pushed up by her bra while he reached around and undid the clasp. He pulled the fabric off from her and tossed it aside. 

When Eric started working to undo her pants, Tris stopped him. “Wait wait wait,” she gasped. 

“What?” Eric whispered as he pulled his mouth away from her nipple.

“Shoes,” she explained. 

Eric leaned down and quickly pulled off one of her boots, then the other, and then he pulled her pants and underwear off. Then he removed the rest of his clothes until they were both naked. 

He closed the small distance between the two of them and roughly kissed her again. “C-condom?” Tris panted against his lips. 

“Shit,” Eric said. “Do not move.” He hurried out from the room, and came back a moment later. He ripped open the condom package and slid it on over his erection before he picked Tris up by the back of her legs and pressed her up against the wall as he entered her. 

Tris let out a breathy moan as he started to pound into her and she wrapped her legs around his waist. The light switch— which didn’t even work because of the device Eric used to keep the power off in the apartment— was pressed uncomfortably against her back. But she didn’t think too much about it because of the things that Eric was making her feel. 

He pressed his lips against the side of her neck, sometimes kissing, sometimes offering light bites at the sensitive flesh there. She ran her fingers through his short hair, her nails scraping at his scalp. Eric let out low grunts of pleasure, but Tris wasn’t sure what was causing them. 

Tris tipped his head back and kissed him. He gently nipped on her lower lip before he kissed her jaw and chin. Tris let her hands fall down over his shoulders. She tipped her head back against the wall and her eyes slid closed as the feelings of an imminent orgasm began to wash over her.

Eric stilled inside of her as he came, and then he fell down onto the floor and dragged Tris down with him. She wrapped her legs and arms tighter around him, not wanting to leave the safety of the moment just yet. He pressed a gentle kiss to her temple, and she tilted her face up for a kiss, which he gave her. It wasn’t rough like before, but sweet and lingering. 

“Are you okay?” he whispered against her lips. “That was a bit rough.”

“I’m fine, but you did shove me into the light switch,” Tris said as she pulled away to rub at the sore spot on her lower back.

“Oh god, I’m sorry,” Eric said. He picked Tris up by the back of her legs and stood. He was still inside of her. He carried her from the bathroom and into the bedroom, where he put her down on the bed and slowly kissed her again. “I’m going to kiss you all better, but give me a moment, okay?” Tris hummed with agreement, and Eric pulled away from her. He kissed her again before he left her lying on the bed. 

Tris rolled over to look at the clock. It was after 1 AM. She wondered if Holly had found the microchips in the lady’s blood, and if the others had already gone home. She hoped so, but worried about what the microchips in the lady’s blood would mean. How far off was the war with Jeanine?

Eric came back into the room and took in the thoughtful expression on Tris’s face. “No,” he said as he crawled up onto her. “You are not allowed to look like that during sexy times.”

“I’m sorry,” Tris said slowly, her eyes downcast. “I’m just thinking about that lady. She must have been so afraid when whatever was controlling her cut off.”

Eric flopped down onto the bed next to Tris and pulled her into his arms. She curled up against him and entwined their legs together. “She was in the third batch of volunteers,” Eric whispered. “I don’t know why they skipped over the second batch, or if there’s a dead body lying in an apartment or unused hall somewhere that we have yet to discover.”

“We have to stop Jeanine before more people get hurt,” Tris said firmly. 

“I know,” Eric agreed. “I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, please let me know if you spotted any grammatical errors so that I can fix them.
> 
> And, like always, reviews and kudos are appreciated.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I posted the last chapter the other day, and then I sat down and I just wrote. I pushed past what's been blocking me from writing, and I just freaking wrote. And then I ended up finishing one chapter that I'd started on and then I started and finished another chapter.
> 
> And while I have been rather distracted in the meantime, I just finished writing another chapter. So I no longer feel like my buffer is about ready to die if I were to actually update. Hence why I'm updating now.
> 
> Hope that everybody enjoys this chapter!

“This has gone on for much too long,” April said to all of the Dauntless divergents two days later. “We either need to remove Jeanine from office… or just remove her.”

“Yeah, let’s go down to Erudite and kick some asses!” somebody exclaimed. This was followed by a lot of excited cheers. Tris and Eric were one of the few people who didn’t seem overly excited about this “plan”.

“Hold on a second, guys,” Natalie cut in. She was the only non-Dauntless person in the room. “You can just barge into the Erudite headquarters, guns blazing, and expect results. Even though Erudite is a faction of intellectuals, you’d still be completely outnumbered.” Awkward silence met Natalie’s statement. “We need to sit back and think about how we’re going to attack them. If we rush in blindly, the only thing that we’ll be moving towards is Jeanine’s goal of wiping out all of the divergents.”

“She’s right,” Eric spoke up. “Blindly rushing in without any sort of plan of action would only lead to our defeat and destruction. It would also tip the scales in Jeanine’s favor; she’d know that we’re on to her. And even if not all of the divergents died during our rush attack, it would make things even harder for the remaining divergents.”

“Jeanine probably knows that we suspect her of something right now, but we can’t let her know what it is that we’ve been working on these past few weeks,” Natalie went on. “I know that you’re angry— if it was Abnegation who were dying because of Jeanine, I’d be calling for blood, too. But you need to be patient.”

There was a beat of silence.

“What’s our next step?” somebody asked. “Surely we’re not to be expected to sit around and wait for Jeanine to brainwash somebody else that she’s experimented on into killing themselves?”

“No, we’re not going to wait. Instead, we’re all going to sit down and come up with a suitable plan of action to take against Jeanine,” Natalie said calmly. “A plan that doesn’t involve all of us barging into Erudite headquarters, guns blazing.”

There was another beat of silence. Then, “Yeah! Let’s plan the shit out of this attack!”

 

* * *

As the days since the woman’s apparent suicide passed, it got increasingly difficult for Tris to act like everything was perfectly fine. She kept to herself, and only ever spoke with the other divergents, who understood what she was going through. 

“Jeanine has told us that the Erudite have made a break-through flu-prevention drug,” Eric said at the next Dauntless leader meeting. “Since three people died of flu-related causes last flu season, Jeanine put her best biologists on the case. She promises that this’ll be ninety-nine percent effective against multiple strains of the flu. She’s asking for faction number counts so that she can deliver the right amount of syringes and bottles to us.” 

Eric looked around at the other leaders. Tris was the only one on edge, and the others were just exceptionally bored with everything. After all, they had no reason to distrust anything that Jeanine said or did. Except for April, who was a better actress at hiding her distrust over Jeanine better than Tris was at this point. 

“Fine fine, release the numbers to Erudite,” Max said with an annoyed wave of his hand. 

“Alright,” Eric said slowly as he made a note of it on his tablet. “Once the vaccine has been delivered, she says that we need to start to deliver it to everybody right away. It apparently has a very short shelf-life.” Tris’s heart started to hammer loudly in her ears. She fought to maintain a look of sheer boredom. 

This couldn’t possibly be good. 

 

* * *

Two days following the meeting, delivery trucks from Erudite came to deliver the so-called flu immunization drug. Tris stood with Ken at the loading dock back behind the kitchens and the two of them oversaw the delivery. One of the Dauntless who’d been asked to help bring in the boxes accidentally dropped the box that he was carrying.

“Hey, careful with that!” Ken barked at the man. 

“Sorry, it slipped,” the man said. He carefully picked the box back up again and hurried on into the compound. 

“You could have been at least a little more worried about it,” Ken snapped at Tris. 

“Well excuse me for thinking that three deaths in a city of millions isn’t that big of a deal,” Tris said with a roll of her eyes. “Getting the flu honestly isn’t that big of a deal. My body knows how to fight off the infection, and relying on drugs isn’t exactly going to give my body a chance to learn how to fight it off on its own.”

“That isn’t true,” Ken said. “Immunizations are basically putting the dead cells of a disease into your body. Your body uses it as practice for if you get sick with it for real.”

“Yes, I understand that,” Tris said slowly. “I don’t protest against children getting polio or small pox vaccines. I just think that it’s stupid to get a flu vaccine.” She turned away from the trucks and the people unloading all of the boxes. 

The truth was that she honestly didn’t care about what they were unloading right now, because she knew that it wasn’t the immunization drugs against the flu. She knew that any deaths from very preventable illnesses were a bad thing, but she was a little on edge. She normally didn’t have any problems with Ken, but she would have gotten into an argument with anybody right now.

After the volunteers had carried all of the boxes into the Dauntless hospital for later distribution, Eric came into the hospital. He opened up one of the boxes and pulled out a small clear bottle that was filled with the “vaccination”. He winked at Tris as he slipped it into his pocket when nobody else was looking. She knew that he’d give it to Holly so that she could look at it and figure out what it really was.

“Shots will begin tomorrow,” Eric said to the dozen or so nurses and two doctors who worked at the hospital. “When somebody comes in, ask for their identification, and check it off against the official list, which has been loaded onto the hospital’s tablets. Since we made the announcement about the mandatory flu immunization yesterday, we expect for people to come in on their own or face punishment.”

“What should we do if somebody doesn’t come in?” the head nurse asked.

“Let us deal with it,” Eric said firmly. He left the hospital, and Tris trailed after him. She followed him all the way up to his office, where he shut the door so that they could have some privacy. Like in April’s office, Eric had another device that shut off all of the electricity so that they were really alone. The only downside to being in his office rather than either of their apartments was that the walls were thin and people had a tendency to linger outside the door to eavesdrop. 

“What are you going to do about the people who didn’t go in to get it?” Tris asked, her voice low. 

“I’ll go and talk to them,” Eric said, his voice the same volume as Tris’s. “I’ll tell them to lie about getting it done, and then check their name off. But, as I’m sure that you’ve already figured out, there’s something very suspicious about this entire thing. Not after two people turned up dead, their blood swimming with microchips. And both of them had gone through a trial of the new fear serum that Erudite is trying to create.”

“Has there been any word on the other volunteers?” Tris asked.

“I check all of the other people who went to be tested, and, aside from Mr. Cottle and Ms. Osborn, all are accounted for. I’ve been keeping an eye on them, but there’s only so much time that I can spend to make sure that they show up to their jobs every day.”

“You should give me the names, and I can check them for you,” Tris said. Eric thought about this for a moment before he went over to his desk and started to write the names down on a piece of paper.

“When you go to check on them, log into my account,” Eric said. “My password is my birth date, and then the word Erudite, all written backwards.”

“Right,” Tris said with a slight nod. 

“Don’t let anybody see that list, either,” Eric said as he handed her the list.

“I won’t,” Tris said as she looked down at the list. She looked up at Eric. “I should get back to work now. I’ll see you later.”

“Okay, later.” He leaned over and kissed her briefly. Tris left his office and headed down the hall to her office. Well, to call it an office would be an insult to actual offices. It was more of a glorified cubicle.

Tris sat down at her desk and entered Eric’s username into the sign-in screen. Then, she typed the password the way that he’d explained it. She was exceptionally pleased when the system logged her into Eric’s account without any problems. 

In order for people to get paid in the city, they checked into a computer. Sometimes, it was more along the lines of logging into a work system, but other times, it was swiping their identification card through a reader that would clock the time between when they swiped in and when they swiped out. Different jobs paid different amounts, and, depending on the job, people might get some more money if they worked hours that they weren’t asked to. So if somebody wanted to keep track if a bunch of people might have killed themselves and nobody had yet to discover the body, this was the best way to do so. 

Tris went person by person down the list that Eric had given her. She found only one person on the list who hadn’t shown up to work for a few days. She made a mark by his name, and when she’d reached the end of the list, he was the only one. She went back to his file to find out where he lived and worked, and jotted the information down next to his name. Then, she started in on her work for the day.

As usual, Tris lost track of time in the rather meaningless tasks that she had to do. She knew that it was something that the leaders all had to do, but they didn’t want to, so they shoved them off onto the leaders-in-training. And, since Tris was the newest one, even Ken handed off work that he didn’t want to do to her.

“Tris,” Eric said. Tris looked up from her paperwork, and smiled, grateful for the break. 

“Before you say anything, I have a field trip for us,” she said. She reached into her desk and pulled out the slip of paper that he’d given her that morning. Eric’s eyes darkened at once as he recognized it. 

“I should have asked you to do it a long time ago,” Eric said, his voice flat. 

“Well, at least we found out, right?” Tris said a bit sourly. Eric gave a non-committal shrug, and motioned for Tris to lead the way. 

Even though the Dauntless compound had been Tris’s home for a few months now, she still didn’t know where some of the specific apartment buildings were. She was able to lead Eric to the general area, but from there, Eric lead her to the specific building. 

Once inside, they rode up to Stu Partida’s floor and easily found his apartment. “Mr. Partida?” Eric called out as he banged roughly on the door with his fist. “Mr. Partida?” They waited a few minutes, but it was obvious that nobody was home. 

“Let’s go ask about him at his work before we go get a key to his apartment,” Tris said as they turned to leave. 

“Yes,” Eric agreed quickly. “Where does he work?”

“He’s a gate guard,” Tris said. 

“Hm, some of the jobs let you go for a while without signing in or out, and pay you under the table, but not the guards,” Eric said. “Let’s go down to their offices.”

Their offices were a few floors below where Tris and Eric worked. It was the lunch hour, but the station was the busiest that Tris had ever seen them before. 

“Ah, Mr. Coulter and Ms. Prior, what can we do for you today?” a man said once he saw the leader and the leader-in-training walk into the station. 

“Is there somewhere that we can talk that’s a little less…” Eric looked around with distaste. “Loud?”

“Yes, of course, right this way,” the man said. He quickly ushered the two of them into an office. Once the door was shut, most of the noise was blocked out. “Sorry about that. It isn’t always such a mad-house in here.”

“We’re here about one of your officers, a Mr. Stewart Partida?” Eric said, jumping right into business.

“Ah, Partida is a wonderful person, but…” 

“You haven’t seen him for a few days?” Tris said with a cocked eyebrow.

“Yes, that’s right,” the man said with some hesitation. “How did you know?”

“We think that something might have happened to him, which is why we’re here,” Eric went on. “To ask about him.”

“By ‘something happened to him’, you don’t mean…?” 

“I don’t know; what do you think might have happened to him, Mr. Brunson?” Eric said coolly. 

“Partida is not the brightest light-bulb, but he is a very dedicated worker, I’ll give you that,” Brunson said after a moment of hesitation. “He’s been working security for the past five years now, and he only ever takes a few days off every years. And then, they were discussed well in advance. He’s never taken off without notice before.”

“So him being gone for this long is highly unusual?” Tris asked.

“Very,” Brunson agreed with a nod of his head.

“Thank you,” Eric said as he stood up. “This has been very helpful.” Tris stood took, and shook Brunson’s hand when he offered it. Then, the two of them left the station. 

“Let’s grab something to eat real quick, and then go get a key to Mr. Partida’s apartment,” Eric said. Tris agreed, and they went to the dining hall. 

 

* * *

After a quick bite, Eric and Tris returned to the apartment building, this time, with a key to the unit. Eric quickly unlocked the door, and they both gasped with horror as soon as the door was opened. It smelt like death inside.

They stepped into the apartment, and saw that there was blood splattered up onto the wall and ceiling. Tris turned away from the grim sight, unable to take having to look at another suicide victim again. 

Eric heaved an annoyed sigh and lead Tris from the apartment. “I’ll call the hospital to come and take care of this mess,” he said to her gently. “You go back to the station and ask for Brunson to cover for us. He came to us and asked us to look into why one of his officers had gone AWOL.”

Tris didn’t need to ask why Eric would want to establish this with the head of the officers. She just nodded and went to do as she was told.

Within an hour, the building was swarming with officers and the nurses who were on duty that afternoon. Tris just stood out in the hall and looked away when the nurses took away the body. Tris didn’t know what would happen to it. She wasn’t sure how Eric had ended up getting Mary Osborne’s body into the hands of the divergents, but there was also a chance that Holly would be able to get the autopsy report this time, too. 

Eric came up behind her and put his hand on her shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.” Tris didn’t need to be told twice. They went down the hall to the stairs, since the nurses were using the elevator. 

 

* * *

“No, it won’t take me long at all,” Holly said as she held the vial up to the light. Not like she’d be able to see anything with her naked eye. “Follow me.” Eric and Tris followed her through the twisting, underground halls that were starting to become more and more familiar to them now. Holly lead them into a room that was set up like a rudimentary lab. 

“Please, have a seat while I set things up.” Holly gestured to a couple of mismatched lab stools that had been shoved under one of the tables. Eric pulled them out and they each perched on the edge of the seats. Holly pulled out a microscope— it was like what they’d used in school. In fact, there were even the numbers written in permanent marker on the side. 

Holly caught their looks and offered them a sheepish smile. “They would have noticed if one of the good microscopes went missing,” she explained. “And we found this out in the garbage. One of the lenses had been smashed. Rather than bother to replace it— and granted, it is exceptionally time consuming to do so— the school just decided to throw it out.” She shrugged. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

She pulled out a box of slides and an eye dropper, and then carefully opened up the vial Eric had given her. Then, she dipped the eye dropper into the “flu vaccine”, put a drop onto the slide, and put a cover on top of it. Then, she put it onto the microscope and turned the light on. After a moment of fiddling with the dials, Holly let out a triumphant cry. 

“You were right, look,” she said. Eric and Tris went over, and Eric looked through the scope. Then, he motioned for Tris to look through, too. She pressed her eye against the scope and instantly saw a bunch of tiny microchips, magnified a thousand times over. 

Tris’s heart started to hammer loudly. She pulled back from the microscope, but had to hang onto the edge of the table for fear that her knees would no longer support her. 

“What is she doing?” Tris finally asked.

“Her plan to get the microchips to not dissolve has finally been completed, and she’s found a way to get them into everybody’s bodies,” Holly said simply. 

“But what is she planning?” Tris asked. 

“I’m almost too afraid to find out,” Holly said quietly. She looked up at Eric and Tris. “What should we do next? We’ll have to tell Natalie, of course, but what about the Dauntless who’ve already had the vaccinations done?”

“They won’t start until the morning, but yes,” Eric said. “If Lewis Cottle, Mary Osborn, and now Stu Partida are any indication, something even worse than a few suicides will happen.”

“I think that it’ll be important to warn the divergents about this,” Holly said as she gestured to the microscope. “But you’ll also need to talk to Natalie about it.”

“We’ll go and see her after curfew,” Tris said. “It’s a lot harder to sneak into Abnegation than it is Erudite.” Holly nodded with agreement. 

“I will leave you to that, then,” she said. “I should get back now; I have a lot of homework.”

“Thanks for coming on such short notice, though,” Eric said. 

“Eh, that’s what I do,” Holly said with a dismissive wave of her hand as she started to clean everything up. “What should I do with this?” She held up the vial. 

“Keep it; it might come in handy,” Eric said. Holly moved to put it in the science fridge. “We’ll go now, too. We’re going to go start telling the others about this in Dauntless.”

“Later, then,” Holly said.

 

* * *

“All I’m saying is that it’s really unusual for you to want to volunteer to do something as asinine as to stand around and make sure that people actually are getting their shots,” Ken said to Tris. 

“Yes, it is, but it’s either stand around in the hospital all day or sit in my office and do paper work all day,” Tris pointed out. Ken shrugged absently. 

“Okay, you do have a bit of a point,” Ken said with an absent shrug. “You can take my shifts since you’re obviously so eager to do them. I’ll get caught up on my own work, and since you’re doing this, then I’ll see if I can do anything that the others send your way instead.”

“Thanks,” Tris said earnestly. She left the offices, and went down to the hospital. The nurses were just setting up a table just inside the front door to check people in, while the others were setting up the little cubicles to administer the shot in relative privacy, but also for the sake of hygiene. It wouldn’t do to create an infection because the doctors put the needles down in an area that hadn’t been properly cleaned.

“Are you here to oversee?” one of the nurses asked.

“Yeah,” Tris agreed. One of the nurses kicked out a chair at the check-in station, and patted the seat with her hand. The other one who’d been there went to go find another chair. 

“Take a seat. You’re going to be here for a while.”

“When is the hospital going to open?” Tris asked as she sat.

“In about half an hour,” the nurse explained. “And we’ll close up for the day at eight, unless there’s an emergency.”

“But don’t you always have somebody in here, even after the normal hours?” Tris asked. When Lewis Cottle had been found, there’d been a nurse on the scene, even though it had been very early in the morning.

“We do, but, like I said, only for emergencies,” the nurse said. 

“I don’t know what problems that you expect to come up, though,” another nurse said as she came back with another chair. “It’s just the flu vaccination.”

“You never know,” Tris said with all seriousness. 

 

* * *

After Tris had taken a quick break to grab something to eat for lunch, Christina, Will, Marlene, Lynn, and Uriah came into the hospital. 

“Hey, Tris. I didn’t know that you were going to be here today, or else we would have come my earlier,” Christina said as soon as she spotted her friend. 

“Yeah,” Tris said with a resigned sigh. “As the newest leader-in-training, I end up doing a bunch of stuff that nobody else wants to do. Such as sitting in the hospital all day long to make sure that people aren’t fucking around and impacting others getting their immunization.”

“Oh, that’s rough,” Will said, and the others nodded with agreement.

“You’ve been so busy lately; we hardly ever see you except for meals. And sometimes, not even then,” Christina went on as Lynn went up to check in. 

“Yes, I’ve been very busy,” Tris agreed. “And I wish that I could have more free time to spend with you, but the things that I’m working on are for the betterment of the entire faction. If you knew what it was that we’re doing, you’d probably thank us.”

Christina laughed a little. “Yes, I’m sure that we would.” She handed her ID card to the nurse next. “Well, we miss you. Could you sneak away at the end of the day to come and at least spend an hour or so with us? Just one hour. And it would totally be cool if Eric came, too.”

“Yes, I’ll see if I can come,” Tris said. “But we’re working on a bunch of other stuff, too, so I’m not exactly going to make a lot of promises about it.”

“That’s okay; don’t stress too much about it,” Uriah said. 

One by one, the nurses in the stations called the next person back. Right after Christina had gone back, Chad poked his head into the room. Tris’s heart plummeted at the sight of him; she and Eric hadn’t gotten around to telling all of the Dauntless divergents about the flu vaccine just yet, but she’d hoped that the word had gotten around.

“Tris, can I talk to you for a second?” Chad asked.

“Sure,” Tris said as she stood. Then, to the nurses, “I’ll be right back.” She walked out of the hospital, but the two of them stood just outside the door. 

“No?” he asked simply as he pointed behind Tris at the hospital.

“No,” Tris agreed. “Sorry, I’d hoped that the word of mouth would have spread about it by now.”

“I’d heard something like… fifth handed, but I just wanted to make sure. I was hoping that you or Eric would be here, to deter all of the others,” Chad said.

“That’s why I’m here,” Tris said with an irritated sigh. “Do you think that you could go around and make sure that everybody else knows, though?”

“Yes,” he said with a slight nod of his head. “I’ll catch you later.” He ran off quickly, and Tris turned around and went back into the hospital. 

 

* * *

The immunization deployment went off without any sort of hitch. As expected, a large portion of the Dauntless population did show up to get their shot. So the leaders had estimated that all of this would take three days. 

After the hospital had closed up for the day at the end of the three day period, Tris went up to Eric’s office so that she could deliver the reports of those who had not come to get their shot. 

“Okay, let’s split this up and be done faster,” Eric said as he looked at the list of people who hadn’t shown up. “You know who everybody is at this point, so you shouldn’t have too many awkward conversations.”

Eric divided the list up, and then sent one half to Tris’s tablet. Most of the people on her list were divergents, so Tris imagined that her task would go pretty quickly. She couldn’t just check off the names too quickly, or else it might raise suspicion. 

She managed to get around to everybody by ten PM, so after she finished talking with the last person on her list, she went straight to her apartment, and collapsed onto her bed from exhaustion. 

“Tris, are you here?” Eric called out a moment later from the front door. 

“I’m asleep!” Tris called out. Eric came into the room. He sat down on the foot of the bed so that he could pull his shoes off. Then, he stood, went over onto his side of the bed, pulled the blankets back, and slid into bed.

“Hey,” he whispered as he rubbed Tris’s back. 

“Hey,” she replied. “Not like I’m not happy to see you or anything, but what are you doing here?”

“I don’t know what might happen, but it’s probably going to happen soon. And I wanted to be with you when it did happen, because I don’t know what might happen.”

“You really are nervous, because you just said ‘happen’ four times in a row,” Tris said. Eric said nothing, and only held his arms out. She moved closer to him and he wrapped his arms around her. Tris entangled their legs together, and then rested her face against his chest. Eric put his chin on top of her head.

“I don’t want for morning to come because I’m afraid of what it might bring.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, please let me know if you spotted any grammatical errors so that I can fix them.
> 
> And, like always, reviews are appreciated.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you spot any grammatical errors, please let me know so that I might fix them. Thanks in advance!

Eric and Tris were awoken around five AM by the sound of distant gunfire and screams. “Stay here,” Eric whispered as he slipped out of bed. He slipped his shoes back on and carefully edged out into the living room. Tris wasn’t one to stay put, so she hastily pulled her shoes back on, too, and walked over to her bedroom door. Eric was carefully peeking out into the hall from the front door.

“Nobody’s around,” he whispered after a moment. “Take anything that you don’t want to leave behind because I don’t know if we’re going to be able to come back.”

“I don’t have anything,” Tris said with a slight shake of her head. “But I also don’t have a weapon.”

“No, me neither,” Eric replied. “We’re going to go down to the tunnels, since it seems like it would be the safest option right now. I don’t know what’s happening, but I suspect that we’re going to find out soon.” He cracked open the door again, and then ushered Tris out into the hall. They ran down the stairs, since they didn’t want to be caught in the elevator in case somebody with a gun started to spray bullets.

When they got down to the third floor landing, they found Nikki, a twelve year old divergent. There were bullet holes in her stomach and chest, and a big, bloody streak of blood down the wall from where she’d collapsed against it. 

“Oh my god,” Tris gasped.

“Come on, there’s nothing we can do for her now,” Eric said as he tugged Tris away quickly. 

They hurried down to the first floor, but paused by the door that would take them out to the lobby. There was a small window that looked out into the lobby in the door, but it was smeared with blood and who knows what else. Tris didn’t want to think about it. Eric tried to crack the door open to see if it was safe, but it wouldn’t budge. 

“Help me push it open,” Eric said. Tris put her weight into the door, and they eventually got it to move. Lying prone on the other side was Drew, another divergent. They quickly stepped over him and ran for the front door of the building. 

There was even more blood out in the main hall of the compound, but a lot of it was bloody footprints and hand prints. Eric pulled Tris back just in time to avoid being spotted by a group of Dauntless who were all carrying guns. The three of them had blood smeared on their faces like war paint. 

“What are we going to do?” Tris whispered as she watched them march off and around a corner. Eric looked around, and then went over to Drew’s body. 

“Come here,” he said. Tris walked over, curious about what he was doing. Eric dipped is fingers in the bloody mess on the floor, and then dragged both of his index fingers and middle fingers across her cheeks on either side. Then, he ran his thumb up her forehead. “Now do me.”

Tris put similar markings on Eric’s face, and then rubbed her bloody fingers off on her pants. Her face felt sticky and disgusting, and the thought that it was blood— and not just any blood, but the blood from somebody that she knew— made her feel physically sick. But she pressed her nausea down and followed Eric back over to the door.

“We’re going to make a run for the Chasm. That’s our best bet of getting out of here at this point. Stay near the walls, and act like you know what you’re doing. Don’t speak unless somebody speaks to you first,” Eric said. Tris nodded with understanding.

Eric grabbed Tris and kissed her roughly. Tris fisted her hands in his shirt and didn’t want to let go. Ever. But finally, Eric pulled away and looked down at her. He reached up and gently brushed away the tears that were just starting to spill from her eyes.

“People who are under mind control don’t cry,” he whispered. “Be brave.” He pulled away from her and hurried out from the building. Tris ran after him, and, within a second, she fell into step next to him. They acted like they knew where they were going and that they were in a hurry to get there. 

As they walked, they heard more screams and more shouts, but they were always so distant, as if it was in another world. But whenever they heard any sounds, they would turn and go a different way that the noises had come from to avoid having to run into anybody.

It took them a lot longer to get to the Pit that way, but they also didn’t see anybody. Once they got to the Pit, they ran as fast as they could down the stairs towards the river, and only when they were completely in the dark did they stop moving. 

“I didn’t think to grab a flashlight,” Eric said. “I know this route really well, though, but we’ll still go slow.”

“I don’t think that anybody is going to come down here,” Tris said. Eric reached back and took her hand. Tris quickly laced their fingers together, and followed after him where ever he lead her. “What just happened? Did everybody just snap? Or was this Erudite’s attack via the microchips?”

“It has to be the microchips; there’s no other explanation,” Eric said quickly. 

“There’s thousands of people in Dauntless; where is everybody?” Tris asked after a moment of hesitation. 

“I don’t even want to think about it,” Eric said. Tris decided that she didn’t want to know, either. She hadn’t seen her mom for days now, and she didn’t know if Jeanine had given the “flu vaccine” to the other factions, or just to Dauntless. 

As they walked along the rocky riverbank in absolute darkness, Tris was surprised at how sure her feet were. She never made a misstep, and never once thought that she’d fall into the river and die. Finally, they reached where the door was. Eric fumbled in the dark for his key, and they finally got the door open. 

There was more blood on the walls and floor, and it made Tris sick to think about who might have been hurt. She didn’t want to think about the possibility that the blood was from either of her parents. 

“Let’s go see what’s left in the armory,” Eric said. He pulled Tris from the meeting room and into the twisting maze of halls.

“Eric! Tris!” somebody called out. They spun around and saw Holly, bracing herself against the door frame of one of the rooms that they’d used as a classroom. Her pants were exceptionally bloody, and she seemed to be savoring her right leg.

“Holly, are you okay? Were you shot?” Eric asked as they rushed back to her. Once they got to the door of the room, they saw that it had been turned into a makeshift infirmary. Those who were able to move around were helping to bandage up those who’d been shot. 

“Yes, but the bullet just grazed me; I’m in a lot of pain, but, as you can see, there are people who are a lot worse off right now,” Holly said. “What’s going on out there? Dauntless people with guns just burst into our apartment and starting shooing everybody.”

“We were hoping that you could tell us,” Eric said. “The Dauntless compound is a complete mess right now. Nikki and Drew are dead. Probably a lot more, but we only saw them.”

Holly closed her eyes and swallowed hard. When she opened them again, there was a hardness in her face that Tris recognized from her own reflection when she went through Dauntless initiation. 

“There’s nothing that we can do for the dead now. We have to tend to the wounded, and try to figure out what’s going on. What our next plan is,” Holly said.

“Do you know where the others are?” Tris asked.

“No. It was all that I could do to get me and my siblings down here. I don’t know what happened to my parents, but that’s beside the point right now. When more and more people started to show up with injuries, we started to treat them. We’ve been doing our best to take care of one another, but we’re running low on supplies. I’m going to have to go out in search of more things soon.”

“Don’t leave the tunnels,” Eric said sharply. “Make do with what you can find here. Use shirts and pants if you need to, but under no circumstances should you leave the tunnels.” Holly nodded with agreement. “We’ll send all that we find down to you.” Eric started to run down the hall again.

“Wait, where are you going?” Holly called out after him.

“We have to go find out what’s happening,” Eric explained. “And to look for survivors.”

“Before we go, have you seen my parents?” Tris asked the younger girl urgently. 

“No, sorry. But if I do see them, then I’ll tell them that you’re alive, but that you went to search for survivors,” Holly said.

“Thank you,” Tris said. She put her hand on Holly’s shoulder briefly. “Be brave.”

“Thanks. Be safe.”

Tris turned and started to run down the hall after Eric. She found him in one of the rooms that Natalie had set aside to be the armory. She was pleased to find that most of the weapons were still there where they’d been put, but then her heart sank when she realized what this meant: that nobody else had come down here to get weapons. 

“Here,” Eric said as he handed Tris a knife. Tris slipped it carefully into the side of her boot, and then accepted the gun that Eric handed her, next. Tris checked the gun and the cartridge, before she slipped it into the waistband of her pants. Then, she accepted a second gun from him, which she also checked. 

“Any word of your parents?” Eric asked as he checked over his own guns. 

“No,” Tris said quietly. 

“I’m sure that they’re fine,” Eric said as he shoved one gun into the waistband of his own pants. “Natalie wouldn’t have started this collaboration of divergents if she didn’t have a quick escape route from her home.” Eric said. 

Tris mulled over his words for a moment, but didn’t find them all that reassuring. She’d lived in that house all her life, and she knew every single inch of it, every little hiding spot. There was no loose floorboard that hid a secret entrance down into the tunnels. Eric caught the look on her face.

“There’s no use worrying over them right now,” he said. “Either they’re safe or their dead. And there’s not much that you can do about either one of those things. Let’s go up and see if we can’t help some of the survivors to safety. Maybe figure out what Jeanine’s end game with all of this is.”

Tris could only not. She followed Eric out from the armory, and through the twisting tunnels until they came to a storm grate in a park. Judging by the play equipment, they were somewhere in Candor’s part of town. She’d gotten a little turned around in the tunnels, and couldn’t figure out where they were. 

They couldn’t see anybody from the grate, so they carefully edged outside. Still nobody around. They hurried towards the edge of the park, where they found a couple of people, lying in puddles of blood. There were bullet holes in their head— they’d probably died long before they’d had any risk of bleeding to death. 

Tris was just thankful that she didn’t recognize them, even though she was a little upset over the sight of more dead people. 

They hurried on from the area. They sometimes came across more dead bodies, but saw nobody alive, mind-controlled Dauntless or otherwise. Tris wanted to ask where they were going, but didn’t want to risk the noise. 

After a few minutes of walking, however, it because clear that they were heading towards the Erudite section of town. Tris wasn’t quite sure what good that they could do there. It was much too late in the game for that. If they put a bullet in Jeanine’s head, somebody else would step into her shoes. Not while the entire city was in complete chaos and most of the Dauntless under mind control. 

But Tris knew that Eric knew that. She didn’t want to ask him what his end goal was. Was he in search of survivors, who, for some reason, decided to come over here? Why would they? Even if they weren’t divergent, and thus, didn’t know about the tunnels, Tris would hope that they’d be smart enough to not leave the general area without any sort of ranged weapon. 

When they rounded a corner and the central Erudite building came into view, Tris let out a startled gasp of horror. The front of the building was completely surrounded by Dauntless members. All of them had blood war paint on their faces, and all of them had blood splattered over them. 

Eric quickly pulled Tris into an alley, where they could see and hear most everything, but they wouldn’t be seen. 

The two of them waited for somebody to come out and address the army. Nothing happened. At least five minutes passed without anything at all happening. The army in front of the Erudite building didn’t so much as scratch at an itch or shift from foot to foot. They were all unnaturally still.

Tris looked up at Eric and gave him a questioning look. He could only offer an absent shrug. Tris tapped her wrist lightly with the butt of her gun. Eric finally turned away from the mouth of the alley and started to creep down towards the other entrance. Tris hurried after him, careful to be as quiet as possible. Just because the Dauntless army was unearthly silent didn’t mean that they were unable to hear noises. 

“Now what?” Tris asked once they were a few blocks away from the Erudite building and the Dauntless army. “What exactly where they doing out there?”

“The hell if I know,” Eric said a bit sourly. “Let’s head back to the tunnels to see if anything new has come up since we left.” Tris followed him into another park, where they quickly went into another storm grate. Once in the tunnel, they broke into a run until they came to the door at the end of the hall. Eric quickly unlocked the door and they hurried into the room.

“Beatrice,” Andrew whispered as he stood up.

“DAD!” Tris exclaimed. She ran across the room and fell into her father’s arms. The two of them hugged the other tightly. After a moment, they pulled away, but didn’t stop touching one another. “Where’s mom?” 

“I don’t know,” Andrew replied quietly. “She said that she had to go and get something, and told me to come here as fast as I could.”

“Do you know where she went?” 

“No, sorry,” Andrew said with a slight shake of his head. “She went off towards the east as soon as we got out from our home.”

“Do you have any information on what happened?” Eric asked.

“The only thing that I know is that Natalie shook me awake a bit after five this morning. Said that there were groups of Dauntless who were marching down both ends of the street. We watched as a smaller group of them kicked down the door of the house at the end of the block and went inside. A few minutes later, one of the Dauntless comes outside, dragging Wendy Kennard by her hair. The rest of them forced the Kennard children out of the house at gun point. Then, they shot Wendy in the head, and started to shoot the kids from the youngest until they were all dead. They did this on the other houses, too. And, judging by all of the bodies that littered the streets, this was done throughout Abnegation.”

“How did you get away dad?” Tris asked with horror. Andrew looked over his shoulder at the meeting table. There was a bloody gun sitting on the middle of the table. That’s when Tris noticed that her father was wearing black Dauntless clothing that was a little too small for him; she’d just been so relieved to see him alive and well that she hadn’t even paid attention to what he’d been wearing. 

“Sometimes you have to do horrible things for your own safety,” Andrew said simply. He smoothed down Tris’s hair. “And I see that both of you did something equally horrible for your own safety.” He gently touched the blood on Tris’s cheek; it had dried and was very uncomfortable. 

“We saw the other Dauntless walking around with blood face paint, and we thought that it would help us to blend in,” Eric explained. “We somehow ended up getting lucky,though, because we didn’t run into any trouble. We came here to get some guns, and then we went to search for survivors… or answers. We went to Erudite’s section of town, and we saw the entire Dauntless army standing outside of their HQ,” Eric explained.

“Oh dad, it was so creepy! I don’t know how long that we stood there, but it was a really long time. Nobody moved at all during the entire time that we stood there.”

“We need to go out and search for your mother,” Andrew said. “I’m really worried about her. But I’ve been here, directing the wounded who come through to what’s now our infirmary. And those who aren’t wounded have been told to help out where they can. We’re running low on supplies, and we don’t have enough medical equipment to deal with something like this on a mass scale.” He shook his head. “And all of this pointless genocide because of some fucking rumor that doesn’t have a single grain of truth to it. He didn’t understand the divergents, and he decided that because of that, we all deserved to die.”

“We can go and search for Natalie, but if you don’t even know where she is…” Eric started.

“No, sorry. She went towards the east. Said she had to get something.”

“What though?” Tris asked.

“I don’t know!” Andrew snapped. “We told each other everything, but in the end… it would appear as though there was still a lot that she kept from me.” Andrew sunk into a chair and buried his head in his hands.

“Dad, it’s not your fault,” Tris said quietly as she walked over to him.

“I know. Your mother and I regret having not told you what you were until it was too late,” Andrew said quietly. 

“I don’t want to just sit around down here while who knows what is going on above,” Eric said. “I need to go up and look for survivors. If there are any.”

“Take some radios, so that we can stay in contact,” Andrew said. “There’s some in one of the supply closets… I know where they are. Wait here, and direct people to the infirmary.” Andrew stood and ran from the room. 

A few minutes later, he turned with several old walkie talkies. Nobody used them anymore, because better technologies had replaced them. One of the Erudite divergents had found a bunch of them in a supply closet, and had thought to at least try them out. Everybody had been pleasantly surprised to find out that, not only did all of them still work, but they also got surprisingly good reception down in the tunnels, and two people could stand on either side of the city and hear one another.

“Just press the button on the side to talk,” Andrew said as he put the radios down on the table. Eric and Tris each grabbed one, and clipped them onto their waistbands. “I’ll be here with one, too. And if other Dauntless show up, but express a desire to go out and search for survivors, I’ll give them radios, too.”

“Okay, but I’m not sure who might be out there,” Eric said with some hesitation. Tris looked over to Eric. 

“I’m curious to see what’s happening now in the Dauntless compound,” she said. “But I’m more worried about finding my mother right now.”

“We don’t even really know where to begin to look for her, but we’ll head out to Abnegation and start from your house,” Eric said.

“I just want to warn you once more about how bloody things were in Abnegation,” Andrew said.

“We had to walk past several dead bodies…” Tris said slowly. “We walked past the body of Nikki in our apartment building.” Andrew shook his head sadly. 

“Just go,” he said. Tris and Eric went out the door that would lead them to the storm grate in the park near the Prior house. 

Andrew had told them twice about how bloody that things had become in Abnegation. However, even before they got out of the tunnel, they could see the bloody mess that Abnegation was. 

“Oh my god,” Tris gasped as they stepped out into the park. While they’d come across bodies, it was nothing in comparison to what it was there. Bodies were piled up on top of one another. Bloody was sprayed up over the benches, the play equipment, the lamp posts. 

“Come on, there’s nothing that we can do for them now,” Eric said once again. The streets weren’t in any better condition that they park had been in. When they got to the street that Tris had grown up on, they didn’t even pause and kept on going down to the other end. Once they got to the end of the street, they both came to a stop. Tris looked around. 

“Where would she have gone from here, you think?” Eric asked.

“There’s a church down there, and sometimes we went to mass,” Tris explained as she pointed down one way. “It might be a good place to hide something. And in that direction is the community center. It would also be a good place to hide something, but if I were searching for Abnegation members to kill, I’d head there first.”

“Let’s go to the church,” Eric said. Tris took off running again, and Eric followed after her. 

There were a couple of people on the steps of the church, and Tris and Eric had to move them in order to just get the doors open. But inside, both were a little surprised to see that things were virtually untouched in there. 

“I guess that not even Jeanine wanted to kill people in a house of God,” Tris said, her voice low. “I wonder if anybody’s here?”

“Hello?” Eric called out, a bit louder. “It’s okay, we’re here to help!”

After a moment, the priest came out from the back room. “I know that God will not allow me to suffer,” Father Theodore said. 

“We’re not under mind control,” Eric said as he held his hands up in surrender to show Father Theodore that he meant no harm. Tris did the same thing. “Are you alone?”

“No, there are several others with me,” the Father said. 

“A bunch of us are hiding in a tunnel system that runs under the city,” Eric said. “It would be a much safer hiding spot for everybody. Plus, there are supplies.”

“There’s a lot of us,” Theodore said. 

“Where’s the nearest entrance?” Tris whispered to Eric. 

“Ask your father; I’ll go see how many that there are,” Eric replied. He walked over to Father Theodore, and the two of them vanished into the back room. Tris pulled off her radio and pressed the button. 

“Hello?” her father’s voice came. The reception was a little staticky, but Tris could still understand him. 

“We’re at the church, and there’s a bunch of people hiding out here. We want to bring them into the tunnels, but where’s the closest entrance from here?” 

There was a moment of silence. “It’s in an alley behind where the feed store used to be,” he finally said. “Behind the dumpster. The door isn’t maintained, but it should be okay.” Tris thought about where the feed store had been before it had been relocated to a bigger building. It had only been about a year or two since that had happened, but nobody had moved into the building, so it sat empty. The building was only about two blocks away, but getting over there with a large group of unarmed Abnegation might be tricky. 

“Okay, we’ll hopefully be coming in a few minutes,” Tris said. Then, she went into the back room. About two dozen people were huddled on the floor. Somebody had moved the bookshelves to cover the windows, and then had moved other things to barricade themselves into the room. But then they’d cleared things away from the door when Eric had called out.

“Where is it?” Eric asked as he walked over to Tris.

“It’s about two blocks away. “Under normal circumstances, it would be nothing to get over there, but…”

“Okay, so what’s the plan?” Eric asked.

“Father,” Tris said as she turned to the priest. “You know where the feed store used to be?”

“Yes, of course,” he said with some surprise. 

“We’re going to go over there,” Tris said. “I’m going to head out first, to make sure that the way is clear. Eric doesn’t know the area, but he’ll help you in case something happens. Go down Devin Road, and then down 10th Street.” Theodore nodded with agreement. 

“Okay guys, come on! We’re leaving now!” Eric barked out. Everybody scrambled to their feet. Eric caught Tris by her arm before she left the room. “Be safe.”

“You too,” she replied. She ran out from the church and started to make her way down to Devin Road. She kept doubling back every few feet to make sure that nobody came up from behind her. When she got to 10th Street, she continued to do the same thing. 

Finally, the old, empty building came into view and Tris doubled back to check the area. A few minutes later, the group of Abnegation who’d been hiding in the church came into view. Tris motioned for them to hurry before she went into the alley and started to push the dumpster away. But it was too heavy and wouldn’t move.

Eric and the others came around the corner. Without even asking, the Abnegation all came around and helped to move the dumpster out of the way. Eric stood in the mouth of the alley to make sure that nobody snuck up on them. 

Finally, the dumpster was moved far enough away to reveal the hidden door. Tris pulled it open and ushered everybody inside. “Eric,” Tris called out once everybody was in. 

“Go with them to open the door,” Eric said. “I’ll stay out here to hide the door again.”

“What, no! I’m not going to-” Tris started, but Eric cut her off.

“The longer we stay here, the more likely that it’ll be that we’ll be found,” Eric said. “Go. I’ll be through in a few minutes. Don’t worry.” Tris went to the door and Eric shut it behind her. After a moment, she heard him shifting the dumpster back over the door.

Somebody had a flashlight, so at least they wouldn’t be stumbling around in complete darkness. Tris pushed her way to the front of the group. “Come on, guys!” she barked. “It’s probably one line to safety.” She lead them down the hall, which really was just one straight tunnel. Tris unlocked the door, and they stepped out into the meeting room. 

“Beatrice,” Andrew said as he stood. Then, “Father Theodore.”

“Andrew,” the priest greeted the other man. “I was not expecting to find you here.”

“Please, come this way. There’s much to do,” Andrew said. He lead the group into another hall. 

Tris paced around the room, then she pulled her radio off and put it down on the table. She put both of her guns down, and then sat. 

But she couldn’t stay seated; she was filled with too much nervous energy. She knew that she’d feel better once Eric got back. She started to pace again.

Andrew came back into the room. “Where’s Eric?” he asked with a frown.

“He wanted to push the dumpster back over the door to hide us a little more. He said that he’d come right back.”

“It might take him a while to get to another entrance,” Andrew said. “I’m sure that he’s fine. Sit down,honey.” Tris continued to pace. 

A few minutes later, another door opened. Tris looked over to the door eagerly, but it was just two Candor members. One of them had been shot in the stomach, and the other one was supporting the first.

“Come on, to the infirmary,” Andrew said as he jumped to his feet. “Tris, help get them there.” Tris rushed over to the man’s side and put his other arm around her shoulder and she wrapped her arm around his waist. It took them a few minutes to get the man to the infirmary, but they eventually got him there.

“I’m glad you’re here, Tris, we need all hands on deck,” Holly barked out as they helped the man onto an empty space on the floor. 

Tris knew that working would help to take her mind off of things until Eric came back, so she asked, “Where can I start?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you enjoyed this chapter, please take a second (or two) to leave me a review or a kudos. I'd really appreciate it!


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ehehe, you guys have no idea how completely giddy that your reviews made me. Of course, I know what it's like to be in the position of "Is Eric alive?! D: ", but knowing Eric's fate already just makes me giggle like mad. I'm sorry guys, I don't mean to be evil, and I promise that you'll know what happened to him in the next chapter!
> 
> Oh, and, I got a review early on (on ff.net) asking about what happened to Susan... Here's the answer. And this isn't the last that we're going to see of her, either.
> 
> If you spot any grammatical errors, please let me know so that I can fix them. Thanks in advance.

It had been several hours since Tris had seen Eric. She knew that he could take care of himself, but that was under normal circumstances. And right now, normal was the absolute farthest thing in comparison to what was happening now. 

Holly had put Tris to work as soon as Tris had stepped into the make-shift infirmary, but the thought that Eric had been captured— or worse, killed— never left her mind. But there was always somebody else who needed attention. Tris might not have been as well-trained in medicine like most of the Erudite were, but she had taken basic first aid, as part of her education as an Abnegation. And despite the fact that she was now Dauntless, Tris couldn’t just shuck sixteen years of Abnegation training. 

Finally, there were no other people who needed immediate attention or who cried out for more help. Tris left the room and went to the bathroom. She washed the blood from her hands, and then yanked her hair tie out. Her hair had become more and more frazzled the longer she’d worked. Tris smoothed it back, and then retied it. Then, she went to the meeting room. Andrew was gone, but a couple of other people were sitting around the table and talking quietly amongst themselves.

“Where’s my dad?” Tris asked.

“He went to try and get some sleep,” a Candor man said. “You look completely dead on your feet; you should think about doing the same.”

“Have you seen my mom? Or Eric?”

“No, sorry,” he said. Tris went back the way that she’d come from to go to the armory, since somebody had clearly taken her guns. But as she went past the infirmary, Holly caught her arm. 

“You’re completely dead on your feet right now, Tris. The only reason why you’re even upright at this moment is because of adrenaline. But now that you’re not doing anything, you’re going to crash. Get some sleep.”

“I have to find Eric, though,” Tris protested weakly, but she knew that Holly was right. She felt so exhausted. 

“You’re not going to be much use to him like you are now. Get some rest, get something to eat, and wait until sunrise before you start up a search,” Holly said. “Plus, you never know what the morning might bring.” Tris had to agree with her. Maybe Eric and her mom would come back while she was asleep. And if not, then maybe more Dauntless members would show up, and she’d had more people to help her search. “A lot of the people who weren’t injured went into the next hall over to sleep.”

“Thanks,” Tris said before she hurried off. She didn’t even glance at the armory as she passed it, and kept on going. She found her dad in the first room she looked in, and went over to him. 

“Hi, honey. Any sign of your mom or Eric?” Andrew asked as she sat down next to him. 

“No,” Tris said with a slight shake of her head.

“They’ll be okay,” Andrew reassured her as he put an arm around her shoulders. “Get some sleep.” 

Tris lay her head down on her dad’s lap and closed her eyes. She thought that she’d have a hard time getting to sleep, but a second after she’d closed her eyes, she was out.

 

* * *

When Tris woke up, her dad was gone and she was lying on a small pillow. There were some other people asleep still, but Tris had been so out of it when she’d gotten into the room that she hadn’t noticed who’d been in there. 

She got up and went down the hall to the bathroom. After she’d relieved herself and then cleaned herself up a little bit more in the sink, Tris went back to the meeting room to see what was happening. 

She found a different group of people in the meeting room, and all of them were completely on edge. 

“Hello,” a different Candor man greeted Tris with some hesitation when she came into the room. 

“Hi,” she said as she crossed the room. She pulled out a chair and sat down. “First things first: have any of you seen my mom or Eric?”

“No, sorry,” the man said. 

“Next: What’s the word on what’s going on?” Tris asked. 

“We don’t know anything,” a Candor woman said with a slight shake of her head.

“What happened to you?” Tris asked them.

“We were awoken by the sound of gunfire at maybe six AM,” the woman said. “Dauntless were marching down the streets, and they all had guns. They kept breaking down the doors of everybody’s homes, one after the other, but they seemed more focused on searching for something. They didn’t offer us any trouble when we ran from our homes, however, for which we’re all very grateful for. Some of the people from Abnegation said that it was a complete bloodbath in their faction. I don’t know why Candor got off easy.”

“A couple of Dauntless were killed, but I have no idea what happened in Erudite,” Tris said. “The only Erudite divergent that I’ve seen since the attacks started have been Holly and her siblings.”

“Andrew said something about a meeting soon, to regroup,” one of the men said. 

“Do you know where he is?”

“I think that he might have headed down to the infirmary?” a woman said with a thoughtful frown. 

“I’m going to go find him and try to get some other together so that maybe we can regroup,” Tris said. She stood and left the room to try to find her dad.

She found him in the hall where the infirmary had been set up. He was talking with Holly and another lady from Erudite. That now brought Tris’s Erudite count up to five. “There you are, Tris,” Andrew said when he saw her. “We’re trying to get people together to have a meeting.”

“Okay, good,” Tris said. “I was coming to find you for that very reason. What do you need me to do?”

“There are a lot of people sleeping in various rooms,” Andrew explained. “Could you go and round up those who are awake? Don’t bother those who are sleeping, though. We’ve been through a horrible ordeal, and sleep is going to be hard to get from here on out.” Tris nodded with agreement and ran off to do as he’d asked.

 

* * *

About half an hour later, a large group of people had gathered in the meeting room. The group mostly consisted of Candor, but there were a few Abnegation who were uninjured, a few more Erudite than Tris had thought that there would be, but even less Dauntless. 

The number of Dauntless divergents there made Tris’s heart sink. Where were they? Had the others been killed? Or had they somehow fallen under the mind controlling devices? 

Most everybody in the room had blood on them, however, Tris was certain that it had gotten on them from either helping others or running through puddles of blood in order to get to safety. 

Among the familiar faces of the divergents, there were also some new faces, such as Father Theodore and those from the church. But there were also some others, who’d likely been brought down because of the attacks above. 

“Okay, first business: does anybody have any idea what’s happening up top?” Andrew started. In the absence of his wife, it seemed as though Andrew was more than willing to step into her empty leadership role.

There were some murmurs, but nobody really spoke up. “We need to organize teams to figure out what’s happening up top,” Tris spoke up. “Where are the rest of the Dauntless?” 

“I don’t know where everybody else is,” a woman named Kat spoke up. “There are a few people in the infirmary. Two probably won’t make it. But everybody else is missing.”

“My mom and Eric are missing, too,” Tris said. “I don’t know about my mom, but Eric had come down to the tunnels with me. We went on a search and rescue mission for my mom, and we came across Father Theodore and some other Abnegation in a church. We had to help them to safety. However, Eric stayed behind to hide the entrance to the tunnel, and he hasn’t shown back up again.”

“Well, there’s six of us, so we could break up into two teams of three,” Chad said. “One to find some information, and the other to try and retrace Eric’s steps.”

The other Dauntless nodded with agreement over this plan. 

“Do you have any idea where Natalie or Eric might be?” a lady named Jessica asked.

“Natalie left the house when the Dauntless came,” Andrew said. “She said that she had to get something, and ran off towards the east.”

“And like I said about Eric: we were searching for my mom when we found the group hiding in the church. He stayed behind to recover the tunnel entrance, and never returned,” Tris finished. 

“I’ll be a hell of a lot easier to try and retrace Eric’s steps, since you know more about his movements,” Chad said. “I’ll go with you to help find them, Tris.”

“Me, too,” Jessica said.

“So that leaves the three of us to find out what’s going on up there,” Kat said as she indicated herself and the other two members. 

The six of them got up and went over to the closet where all of the spare clothing was kept. Tris quickly found the dress that she’d worn when she and Eric had gone to deliver her mother’s message to Caleb. 

As Tris dug around for the cardigan that she’d worn with it the other time, she realized that her brother was not present. She found the cardigan, and then went back into the main room. “Where’s Caleb?” she whispered to her father.

“Caleb? I haven’t seen him,” Andrew said with a thoughtful frown. “You don’t think…”

“He’s already betrayed us once,” Tris said dryly. “What’s to say that he hasn’t been spying on us this entire time?” Andrew pressed his lips together and didn’t say anything. However, he didn’t need to, as his uncertainty of his son spoke volumes to Tris.

She turned on her heel and left the room. She went into the bathroom to change. Even though it felt strange to put on the blue Erudite clothing, it felt good at the same time just to no longer be wearing her blood-crusted clothing. 

Once she’d changed, Tris left the bathroom and went down to the armory. Kat silently handed her a gun, a knife, and then a radio. Tris didn’t have a waistband to stick a second gun into, but she did slip the radio into the pocket of the stress, and then clipped it onto the fabric on the inside so that it wouldn’t fall out while she was running.

“We won’t pass scrutiny, but something tells me that it’s not going to be important right now,” Jessica said as she looked around at the others. Chad looked like a wild man with his unnameable, curly hair, and Kat had a bunch of neck and face tattoos. They would have never passed off as Erudite before, but Tris knew that right now, it didn’t really matter all that much.

“We’re going to go up to an entrance close to the Erudite’s HQ,” Kat said, ignoring Jessica. “All of our current problems stem from them anyway.”

“Okay,” Tris agreed. “We’ll head up to Abnegation to try and retrace Eric’s last known steps.” Kat’s group left, and Chad and Jessica turned to Tris.

“It would be a lot easier if we could go out the door that you went through last,” Chad said.

“The door swung inward, so we could probably use it. So long as we can move the dumpster away,” Tris said. Jessica and Chad exchanged a look.

“We could probably do that,” Chad said after a moment. Tris lead the way to that tunnel. When they got to the door, they quickly pushed the dumpster away. As they stepped out into the early morning light, Tris looked towards the mouth of the alley, as if she expected to find Eric waiting there for her. 

“He might have gone back to the tunnel that we initially came out of,” Tris finally said. Jessica gestured for Tris to lead the way. 

Slowly, the three of them started to walk through the streets. Everything was still just as bloody as it had been the day before. Everything was eerily quiet; not even the sound of bird song broke the unearthly silence.

Tris retraced the steps that they’d taken the day before in order to reach the church from the park, since it would likely be the only way that Eric would have gone. However, they got back to the park and saw no obvious signs that Eric had been there at all. There wasn’t any more blood by the entrance into the tunnels than there had been when they’d left them to search for Natalie. 

“Do you think that he might have encountered more Dauntless and went to hide somewhere?” Jessica asked after they’d reached the storm drain. 

“It’s possible, but where would he have hidden? He doesn’t know the area well,” Tris said. 

“There are tons of empty houses around here that have been opened up thanks to the Dauntless,” Jessica pointed out dryly. 

“Yes, but if he really did have to hide, you’d think that he would have left as soon as the cost was clear,” Chad pointed out.

“And maybe radioed for help,” Tris said with a sinking heart. But then she shook her head, refusing to believe that anything really bad had happened to Eric. 

“Let’s head back to the church,” Jessica suggested after a moment. “Maybe he got caught up somewhere near there.” For a lack of anything better to do, Tris followed after the two older Dauntless members. 

But the church was empty, the bodies near the front door right where Tris and Eric had moved them. They went inside for a moment to gather their thoughts. “Okay, so we retraced the steps that Eric might have made after he left you, but we really have no way of knowing exactly where he went,” Chad said.

“Right,” Tris agreed slowly. 

“When you were up here yesterday, searching for Natalie, where did you think that she might have gone?” Jessica asked Tris.

“My dad said that she’d gone towards the east, but that was the only thing that he could offer,” Tris said. “Eric and I approached the neighborhood from that way, but when we got to the end of the street, she could have gone in just about any direction. I speculated that if she wanted to hide something, either the church or the community center were both good places. However, I thought that if Erudite mind-controlling the Dauntless wanted to find more Abnegation to kill, they’d look in the community center. Everybody knows that it’s where we go during big storms and such. We went to the church, and found those people hiding there, so we broke off the search for my mom to help them instead.”

“I know that Eric doesn’t know the area all that well, but he is one of the Dauntless leaders, and, as such, must know the entire city,” Jessica said. “So there is a chance— however slim— that he went there to look for your mom.”

“There is,” Tris reluctantly agreed. Chad gestured for her to lead the way. They left the church and walked the few blocks over to the community center. 

Aside from school and home, Tris had spent a lot of time here. All Abnegation members were required to do a certain amount of community service per week, and most of the jobs had been at the community center. The front part was a soup kitchen for the homeless and poor, and there was an area in the back for people to live in while their home situation could get figured out. 

In a section off to the side, there were offices for the Abnegation members to sit down with those down on their luck to help them figure out how they could turn their lot around. Either through job training, to find them another job, to help them get a new house, or just about anything that they might need. However, only full Abnegation members could help with that task. Everybody else just worked in the kitchens or did other tasks, such as to clean up the living spaces. 

It had been early when the attack had happened, so there was only one man in the eating area of the soup kitchen. He was slumped over his oatmeal, which had become bloody. Although the soup kitchen had proper set meal times, Abnegation wouldn’t exactly turn somebody away if they came in and were hungry. 

The three of them progressed back behind the food line, which was currently empty, and into the kitchens. There were some people here, all dead. One of them was slumped over the stove and one of them was lying on the open oven door. There was a pan and a bunch of dinner rolls scattered on the floor next to the oven.

“It’s a wonder that nothing caught on fire,” Chad said as they looked around. “The oven’s still on.” He went over and flicked it off. There wasn’t anything more to see back there, so Tris lead them to a door that would take them into the living area. 

“Split up and search the rooms,” Tris said. There were a couple of bloody rooms, but it looked as though the occupancy hadn’t been that high at the moment of the attack. Tris was just thankful for the small favor. After they’d cleared all of the bedrooms, they quickly checked the communal bathrooms, the offices, and then the teen area. Since it had been so early, not many people had been in there, and it was a quick search. 

“It would be so much easier if we knew what your mom had been looking for,” Jessica said as they stood in the teen area. It was probably the least bloody area in Abnegation, since it had been empty at the time. “I know that she’s entitled to her secrets, but right now is not a good time to be keeping them. Especially not if she’s going to go running off without another word.”

“Yes,” Tris agreed absently as she looked around the room. There were probably a million and one hiding spaces in the building, and she had no way of knowing if her mom had hidden whatever she was looking for here. They’d only just been looking around for possible survivors— although so much time had passed now that any survivors were probably long gone from the area— as well as Eric and Natalie. Not what Natalie might have been looking for. 

“Well, just wandering around the city looking for either of them isn’t exactly going to help us much,” Chad said after a moment. “We need to think of a plan.”

“Do you think that your mom might have hidden whatever she was looking for in Divergent? Or Candor?” Jessica asked.

“I don’t know,” Tris said with a slight shake of her head. “The older I get, the more I find out that I know next to nothing about my parents. And it’s frightening. She wasn’t even born in the city, but came from outside.”

“What?” Jessica and Chad asked in near-unison. 

“She told me that she’d been sent into the city to help with the divergent killing problem,” Tris said. “This is not a time for secrets, as you just said, and I don’t think that she’d mind too much if I told you now.”

“This changes everything…” Chad said slowly.

“What?” Jessica asked him sharply with a look of pure confusion on her face. Tris’s face mirrored Jessica’s.

“When you said that Natalie had gone off to get something, I thought that it was just some silly trinket… or maybe even a gun or something,” Chad explained quickly. “But now that you’re telling me that she was born outside the city and was only brought in to help the divergents, I think that maybe it was something much more important than anything that I might have thought.”

“You don’t think that what she went after has to do with why she’s in the city… do you?” Tris asked with some hesitation. 

“I’m not one hundred on this, but yes,” Chad agreed. 

“What else did your mom tell you?” Jessica demanded. 

“About what?” Tris asked with some hesitation. 

“About literally anything! Something that she told you, and only you!” Jessica hissed. Tris thought about this for a second.

“She said that we were an experiment,” Tris said, her voice low. “Lab rats running through a maze, and people watch us for entertainment.”

“What?” Jessica asked once more with confusion and horror on her face. 

“The Watchers,” Chad whispered. Tris nodded with agreement. Understanding flashed across Jessica’s face, but was quickly replaced by horror. 

“We have to tell everybody,” she whispered, her voice urgent. “This could change everything.”

“How?” Chad demanded. “What exactly are we going to do with this information?” Jessica looked around the room, and Tris knew that she was looking for possible hiding places for the cameras. Chad heaved an annoyed sigh. “Are we going to call off the search for now?”

“For now, but I promise that once we have more information, we’ll try to find them,” Jessica reassured Tris. Tris nodded with agreement. There were just too many places where either Eric or her mom could have gone. They left the community center and quickly headed back to the tunnels. 

When they returned to the main room, they found that most everybody had left, and again, only a small group remained to direct people where to go. 

“Beatrice?” somebody asked as they stood. Tris was startled, and wondered who could have called her name. Then…

“Susan!” Tris exclaimed. She ran the few feet over to her childhood friend and warmly embraced her— something that had been frowned upon in Abnegation. “I’m so glad to see that you’re okay! But… how did you get here?”

“Caleb found me hiding in the bushes outside my house and brought me here,” she said quietly. “Oh Beatrice, everything was so horrible! The Dauntless came and they killed my parents, everybody down the street… When we heard them coming, my mom told me to go out the back door and to hide in the bushes. I thought that there was no way that it would work, because they all seemed to be searching for something. They were going into the houses and dragging everybody out. But… even though they marched through the back yard, they never saw me. Even after they’d gone, I was too afraid to move. Caleb eventually came by— I think that he was looking for me.”

Tris felt a little guilty about calling her brother a traitor earlier when he’d gone out of his way to save Susan. They had been a couple before he’d chosen Erudite… or rather, as much as a couple as two Abnegation children can possibly be. 

But not too much, because she still didn’t exactly trust him. 

Susan had started to cry while she explained all of this to Tris, and fat tears dripped off from her chin. “I’m so scared, Beatrice. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“No, none of us, do,” Tris reassured her. “Why don’t you go and get some rest, okay?” Tris put a comforting arm around Susan’s shoulders and lead her from the room. After Tris had settled her old friend in one of the rooms designated for sleeping, she went to find her father. As she walked through the halls, Tris felt another pang of guilt, this one deeper over her thoughts about her brother.

The last time that Tris had talked to Susan had been the day of the choosing ceremony. And ever since Tris had joined Dauntless, she hadn’t given two thoughts about her friend. She’d been so wrapped up with her own problems… first initiation and Peter, and then the Erudite trying to kill all of the divergents on top of her leadership training. 

The last time Tris had seen Susan, she’d dropped her blood into the Abnegation vat. She’d chosen to stay in the faction that she’d been born in. But now, Jeanine was set on tearing the entire faction system apart just because she didn’t like divergents. Susan was one of the lucky ones and she survived the initial attack… but how many other Susans were there who weren’t able to even say as much?

“No luck?” Andrew asked as he came out from the infirmary and spotted his daughter. 

“No,” Tris said slowly. “But there’s too many places where either of them could have gone. We decided to fall back. Also… There’s something that I want to talk to you about.”

“Oh?”

“It’s about mom. About how she wasn’t born in the city. And the Watchers.”

“Natalie had told me that she’d told you,” Andrew said, his gaze dark.

“I told Chad and Jessica, and they seem to think that it’s important that we tell everybody. No more secrets. Secret-keeping is what’s driven us to this point,” Tris said.

“You don’t need my permission to tell everybody, honey,” Andrew said gently. 

“But, you might know more than I do!” Tris hissed at him. Andrew pulled Tris to the end of the hall, and then they went down another hall. Andrew opened up a room and peeked inside, and then pulled Tris in after him. It was dark in the room, but they were alone. 

“I’m going to tell you everything that I know about your mother,” Andrew started. “I met her at school when we were both fifteen. She was trying to be just another Dauntless, but, from the moment I saw her, I knew that something was very off about her. For starters, I’d never seen her before. And I make it a point to notice everybody. To at least know their names But I’d never seen her before. I went over to her after school and I asked her about it. She told me not to tell anybody, but she’d been born outside the city. She had a mission, but at the time, she wouldn’t tell me what.”

“I don’t understand,” Tris said with a slight shake of her head. “How can it be that you were the only one who noticed that she stood out?” 

“I don’t know, and if your mom had an answer, she never told me,” Andrew said with some hesitation. “But I was super curious about her, and I wouldn’t leave her alone. We became close. Very close. The night before our choosing ceremony, Natalie snuck over to my apartment in Erudite-”

“Erudite? Dad, I didn’t know that you were from Erudite!” Tris interrupted him with a startled gasp. 

“Yes, most of my family is from there,” Andrew said. It sounded as if he was overly embarrassed by this. “But please, you asked about your mother.” Tris gave him a “go ahead” gesture. “She snuck into my apartment and she told me about how she’d been sent into the city to help save the divergents. The people who’d put her into the city had told her to join Erudite, but they have very rigorous tests in order to become a full member. And even if somebody does become a full member, they start at the very bottom of the stack, and have to work their way to the top. Natalie knew that, even if she did somehow manage to become an Erudite, she might spend her entire life working in order to get close to Jeanine, and never be able to actually reach her.”

“So she just gave up? Without even trying?” Tris asked, a little ashamed at her mother’s decision. 

“I tried to tell her that I’d help to tutor her, and then she just broke down crying. I’d known her for a while, and it was the first time that I’d ever seen her get upset like that. She kissed me then, and it was the first time that we’d kissed. And it was also when I realized that I loved her. Natalie told me how to hide any possible divergence that I might have during the simulation the next day, and, when both of us went up to make our decisions that evening, we both picked Abnegation. Because it was the only way that we could truly be together… to be safe. Your mom knew what she was giving up, but vowed to help the divergents in some other way. After we became full Abnegation members, the two of us began our formal Abnegation courting process, and then we were married. And then along came your brother, and you, a year later.”

“What did she tell you about the Watchers, though?” Tris asked.

“Not much, only that the entire city was a giant social project that the rest of the world watched,” Andrew said. “I knew that there was more outside the fence, but I honestly never really thought much about it before. I just though… that they’d died in some war or something. I never really imagined…” He trailed off and shook his head slightly.

“When I told Chad this, he seemed to think that the thing that mom went after had something to do with the fact that she was born outside the city, and had been put in here to help the divergents,” Tris explained. 

“She never told me that she’d brought anything from outside,” Andrew said with a slight shake of his head. “But if she did, then it might be in the Dauntless compound, since that was where they slipped her in at first.” Tris’s eyes widened at the thought; that had never occurred to her. “But we should wait to hear what Kat, Rachel, and Jeremy have to say about what’s going on up top.”

“Yes,” Tris agreed. “We don’t really have anything to report about what we saw in Abnegation that anybody here from Abnegation couldn’t already say. The streets were literally devoid of life, and the only thing that we saw were the dead bodies of Abnegation members.”

“Mayday!” the radio in Tris’s pocket crackled. She yanked it out quickly. “Mayday!” It was Kat. “We’re coming in hot!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you enjoyed this chapter, please take a second (or two) to write me a review or to leave some kudos. They're always appreciated!


	19. Chapter 19

“Mayday! Mayday! We’re coming in hot!” Kat screamed over the radio. 

“Shit! Get everybody who can fire a gun a gun!” Tris said to her dad as she ran off. “Kat, where are you?”

“We’re by a park in Erudite? I don’t know which one, though!” Kat said. 

“You cannot lead them to the tunnels!” Tris barked out. “It’s important that they never find out about them! Attention, all hands on deck! We need to get up to Erudite to help the others!” She burst into the meeting room, and the people sitting around the table all stood at once, startled.

“We need all hands on deck to help Kat and her team out!” Tris yelled. “We cannot let them find the tunnels, no matter what!”

“Where are they?” Holly asked as she hurried into the room from another hall. 

“She didn’t know,” Tris said with a slight shake of her head. “But they’re in Erudite. In some park.”

“Send teams up to Erudite to help them escape from their attackers,” Holly said. 

“We’ll go up and help,” a Candor man said as he and a couple other people stood up. Tris nodded slightly at them.

“Go grab some guns and hurry back here,” Tris said just as Chad and Jessica ran into the room, several guns in hand. 

“Here,” Chad said and the two of them started to hand the others weapons. 

“Come on,” Tris said once all of the gun had been passed around. She lead them over to a door, and out into the dirt tunnel that would lead them to a park in Erudite. “Kat, hang on for as long as you can! We’re coming for you!”

“Okay, but hurry!” came Kat’s rather panicked reply. 

Tris had everybody wait at the hidden entrance to the park until she’d made sure that the immediate area was clear. Then, they all ran out from the tunnel. “Split up into smaller groups and search for them. If you find them, attempt to draw away their attackers so that the group can escape. Try not to kill anybody unless you have no choice,” Tris whispered to them.

“Roger that,” a Candor man said. Everybody broke off into groups of two or three and headed off in different directions. 

Tris somehow ended up with a Candor woman; she couldn’t quite remember what her name was, but thought that it might have been Megan. The two of them crept through the trees. Every so often, they would come across a giant puddle of blood on the path and some footprints that lead away from it, but there weren’t any bodies. Tris wasn’t sure what was worse: actually seeing the bodies, or the fact that somebody had obviously been by to pick them up, but hadn’t bothered to clean up the blood. 

After walking for about five minutes, they heard the sharp sound of gunfire. Tris froze, uncertain of where the sound was coming from. 

“Um, anybody know where that just came from?” somebody asked over the radio. 

“Don’t rush into anything blindly,” Tris said into her own radio. 

“I think that it came from over here,” Megan said. Tris nodded with agreement, and followed the other girl through a rather thick patch of foliage until they reached another path. 

“Let’s stick to the foliage— you don’t know if they might jump out and attack us,” Tris whispered. Megan nodded with agreement, and they started to creep along in the line of trees by the path. 

They’d just reached the edge of the trees when a sharp scream ripped through the air, immediately followed by a loud bang. Both girls flinched, and then looked to one another. Tris made a small motion with her head the direction that both sounds had come from. Megan looked like she was going to be ill, but she gave a small nod of her head. They ran out from the trees towards the other pocket of trees on the other side of the path. 

But just as they approached it, a group of three Dauntless members stepped out from the trees. 

“Shit!” Tris swore under her breath. She half-turned to retreat the way that they’d come from, but saw that other Dauntless members were approaching from all sides. They were out-numbered and out-gunned. 

“What do we do?” Megan whispered urgently. 

“Surrender,” Tris said as she dropped her gun onto the ground and held her hands above her head. Megan was quick to do the same thing. 

 

* * *

The Dauntless who’d captured both Megan and Tris had shoved a bag over Tris’s head so that she couldn’t see where they were going. But where ever it was that they were taking her, it was dark. Somewhere below ground, possibly. 

It was unearthly quiet down here, the only sounds that of the footsteps of those who were guiding Tris to whatever fate awaited her. Her heartbeat seemed unusually loud in her ears because of this.

Finally, Tris heard them open up a door, and then somebody shoved her into the room. She stumbled a little, and then fell roughly on her hands. She heard the door slam shut behind her. The sound seemed to echo into forever. 

Somebody helped her up, and pulled the bag off from her head. “Tris?” an overly familiar voice asked, and then she was swept up into a hug. 

“Eric?” Tris gasped. She clung tightly to him, and never wanted to let go. Ever. “I thought that I’d never see you again.”

“Yes, me too,” he whispered into her ear. He pulled back slightly but neither released the other. 

“What happened to you?” she whispered as she took in his face. Somebody had ripped out his eyebrow ring, which had left an ugly, bloody mess on his face. It didn’t look as though anybody had come by to try and offer him medical aid, but he’d done his best to patch it up. 

“I was trying to get back to another entrance when a group of Dauntless fell on me. I tried to escape, but there were too many of them,” Eric explained. “What happened to you? You weren’t trying to look for me when you were captured, were you?”

“We did organize a search for you, but there were just too many places that you might have gone,” Tris said quietly. “I didn’t even want to think of worst-cast scenarios at all.”

“Did you ever find your mom?” Eric asked. Tris shook her head sadly. 

“No… but… We think that we might now know what she was looking for,” Tris whispered urgently. 

“What?”

“Not here, they’re probably listening to us,” Tris whispered into his ear. She leaned back on her hands and offered him a grim look. “I don’t suppose that you know anything about what’s going on, do you?”

“No,” Eric said quietly. “And even though I’m beyond happy to see you, I don’t like the fact that they’ve put us into a cell together.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

“Do you honestly think that Jeanine is really stupid enough to put two divergents in a cell together?” Eric asked her sharply. Tris gave a slight shake of her head. “She’s probably listening to us right now, hoping that we’ll tell her some of our secrets or something.”

“But we don’t know anything,” Tris said quickly, even though this was a blatant lie. Eric shook his head slightly.

“She somehow knew that I was double-crossing her the entire time, and since you’re my girlfriend…” Eric trailed off absently. Tris heaved an annoyed sigh. 

“It was worth a shot,” she said. Eric tried to offer her a smile, but it came out more like a grimace than anything. Then, he gently brushed back a strand of hair behind Tris’s ear.

“Are you okay?” he asked gently.

“They didn’t hurt me,” Tris said. “Are you okay? You were in here over night.”

“I’m slowly starving to death, but other than that… they threw me in here and didn’t come back until they opened up the door to throw you in here, too,” Eric said. 

“What do you think that Jeanine’s planning for us?” Tris asked hesitantly after a beat of silence. 

“Knowing her, nothing good.”

 

* * *

It was all too easy to lose track of time in the cell. There were no windows to track the sun, and the guards had taken both Tris’s watch as well as Eric’s. After a while, Eric put his head down on Tris’s lap and tried to get some sleep in order to help conserve his energy. Tris was feeling physically okay.

Emotionally, not so much. She was worried about what Jeanine was planning… both for her long-term plans for the city, as well as what she was going to do with all of the divergents that she’d already captured. 

Although Tris had no idea how many others that there were, she guessed a lot. She didn’t know what had happened to Megan after the two of them had been captured, or even what had happened to the Dauntless divergents, or the other divergents who’d gone out to help rescue the Dauntless. Tris closed her eyes for a moment and just prayed that the others had made it safely back to the tunnels. That somebody had noticed that she was missing and that they were mounting a rescue mission for them. 

But the longer they sat in the cell, the more Tris began to doubt. Jeanine presumably had all of Erudite, minus the Erudite divergents, in her pocket. Tris had no idea what had become of the rest of the Candor faction, but most of Abnegation was probably dead. And with most of Dauntless either dead or under Jeanine’s mind control… 

She didn’t want to even think about it, but their prospects did not look good. At all. Even the prospects of any of the divergents who’d survived the initial attack didn’t seem very good at the moment. 

Tris had just drifted off into an uneasy sleep when the door burst open. “Get up,” an Erudite man barked out at them as four Dauntless hustled into the room. Two of them yanked Eric to his feet and the other two grabbed Tris. As they lead the two of them away in separate directions, Eric looked over his shoulder at Tris and mouthed two words: “Be brave.”

Tris’s gaze hardened as the guards took Eric around the corner and out of her sight. After a moment, she could no longer see the hallway that she’d been kept down, too, as she was carried away. 

She had joined Dauntless to prove something to herself. Not to her parents or Caleb or even to Tori. To herself. She wasn’t Michelle, she knew exactly where she belonged. And it was not in the custody of some uppity Erudite lady who’d gotten too big for her britches. 

However, Tris hung limply in the arms of the Dauntless, since she knew that she couldn’t possibly take them. They were both easily twice her size, and both of them had guns tucked into their belts. 

The most important thing that Tris had learned since finding out that she was divergent was to embrace her divergence. She’d scored for all four factions, after all. She needed to be brave like a Dauntless for whatever Jeanine had planned for her, but at the moment, she needed to be smart like an Erudite until she could think of a plan that didn’t involve being killed by the brainwashed Dauntless. 

The guards took her to another room, shoved her inside of it, and slammed the door on her before she could even think about trying to escape. She turned around and started to pound on the door for a moment before she realized that it was completely hopeless. 

As Tris slid to the floor, she began to feel a crushing hopelessness take over. At least she’d clung onto a little shred of it when she’d been downstairs with Eric, but now that they’d been separated, she no longer felt secure in the knowledge that help was coming. 

 

* * *

It was even easier to lose track of time when she was by herself. She tried to sleep, but was jerked awake every time she finally started to drift off by some cruel sound or another. Nothing ever human, though. It was the clang of metal against metal, or the rough sound of a door slamming closed. Although, with Tris already feeling so very broken, she wasn’t quite certain if the sounds of screams or whimpers would have been better. 

Finally, the door opened again and two more Dauntless came in to take her someplace else. Tris didn’t even bother to fight them— she had no energy. She had no idea how much time had passed, but it felt like it could have been days, judging by how famished that she was. The guards took her into an office.

Tris knew this place… it was where she’d come to talk with Jeanine after the first round of experiments that she and Eric had overseen. Jeanine’s office. 

“Good afternoon,” a cool voice said. Jeanine. She stepped into the room from another door, and then put a hot plate of potatoes, stake, and cranberries in front of her. “Go on, please, eat. It’s not poisoned, promise. I have much bigger plans for you that don’t involve you dead. Trust me when I say that if I’d wanted you dead, Beatrice, you would be dead.”

Tris was so hungry that she didn’t really give a damn about what Jeanine had to say. She sat down and began to eat as quickly as possible, as if afraid that Jeanine would change her mind and take the food away. 

Jeanie sat down and just watched as Tris ate. After a few minutes, the older woman’s stare began to seriously unnerve Tris, but she didn’t dare say anything. After all, Tris was completely at Jeanine’s mercy. One wrong word could set her off and then Tris would be dead. 

Finally, Tris had eaten everything on the plate, and sat back in the chair. 

“Well, how was it?” Jeanine asked with a pleasant smile that Tris saw through in a heartbeat. 

“Delicious,” Tris said carefully. 

“Now then, Beatrice, I wanted to ask you about your parents,” Jeanine went on without missing a beat.

“I don’t know where they are,” Tris said, also without hesitation. “I saw the devastation that the Dauntless caused in Abnegation, so my best guess would be that they’re probably dead.”

“Hm, yes, you’re probably right,” Jeanine said coolly. Tris grit her teeth to stop from lashing out at her. How in the world could she be so damned calm about such actions? “It’s so completely horrible what the Dauntless did to the city. I don’t know how we’ll ever bounce back from this heinous attack. I don’t suppose that you know what caused them to all snap like they did, do you?” Tris’s fingers dug into the fabric on her skirt, dug into the skin on her leg. If she didn’t hurt herself, then she would only just jump across the table and pound Jeanine’s head into the desk until she was dead. 

“No, I don’t,” Tris said after a thick pause. “I might be… have been… a leader-in-training, but that doesn’t mean that they told me everything about what was going on in the faction. The attack was just as much of a surprise to me as it was to you.” And by surprise, Tris meant that it wasn’t a surprise at all. And she was sure that Jeanine knew this. 

“That’s neither here nor there,” Jeanine said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “What I really wanted to talk to you about is your mother.”

“My… mom?” Tris said with some confusion. But after a beat, she couldn’t say that she hadn’t seen this coming. After all, Natalie was the leader of the divergents, as well as somebody who might hold all of the answers that Jeanine was trying to find. “Why? What about her?”

“I was actually hoping that you could tell me,” Jeanine said as she leaned back in her chair and considered Tris over the top of her tented fingers. “As the leader of Erudite, I have access to all of the city’s records. Every child ever born, every death, every inter-faction transfer, no matter when or how. But the problem is… one day, your mother just showed up in the city. There are literally no records of her from before that… no birth records, no mention of her parents…”

“I… I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tris stammered out. Her heart was beating so very fast and seemed overly loud in her ears. “I haven’t seen her at all since I transferred, and I’ve only seen my dad once, at the leader meeting.” Jeanine considered Tris for a long moment. Tris began to think that maybe Jeanine believed her.

“THAT IS A LIE!” Jeanine yelled as she slammed her fists onto the table. Tris jumped and tried not to look guilty. “I know that you’re a divergent, just like Eric is. And when I consider how close that the two of you are, I know that he must have taken you to see your mother.”

“What? No, that’s impossible,” Tris said quickly. “I haven’t seen my mom since I transferred! And that’s the truth!”

“Fine,” Jeanine said as she reached for something in a drawer. Tris’s heart leapt into her throat, for surely Jeanine was going to kill her now that she’d proved that she wouldn’t cooperate. But instead, the door opened and the same two Dauntless who’d brought Tris into the room came back in again. “Take her back to her cell. Maybe another day with her own thoughts and no food will help jog her memory.” The men physically lifted Tris from the chair and carried her from the room. 

“I know that you’re the one who’s behind all of this, Jeanine,” Tris said coolly before she was completely out of earshot. “And even though I can’t promise you that we’re going to kill you, I believe in fate enough to rest assured that you will be stopped, one way or another.” 

 

* * *

Back in the same cell from earlier, Tris paced around the room for a moment, just trying to gather her thoughts. Was all of this even about divergents? Was this just Jeanine trying to get back at Natalie for some past crime? Was Natalie’s crime simply that she did not exist in Erudite’s “perfect” system? Or was there a hell of a lot more that Natalie was hiding? 

What had she been going after when she’d left home the morning of the attack? Did it really have something to do with the reason why she was in the city, as Jessica had thought? 

Unable to come up with answers for any of those questions, Tris slid down to the floor with her back against the wall and looked around the room. It was pretty sealed up; it would be hard to get in or out without using the door. The only thing that wasn’t concrete was a tiny air vent that was maybe a bit bigger than Tris’s hand, and the light fixtures in the corners of the ceilings. 

Tris was certain that there were cameras in the lights, maybe in the vents, but she didn’t care. Jeanine could watch Tris all that she liked, but it wasn’t like Tris was prone to talking about divergent secrets out loud. 

A second later, the door burst open and both Andrew and Natalie were there. “…Mom?” Tris asked with some hesitation as she scrambled to her feet. “Dad? How did you guys find me? And where have you been, mom?”

“There’s no time to explain, Beatrice,” Natalie said urgently as she reached for her daughter. But Tris shied away from her mom’s gaze. “Come on, honey, we have to leave! Now!”

Tris looked around, and then she threw out her arms. The walls all collapsed around the cell, and the three of them stood in the middle of the town, still standing in the remains of the cell Tris had been in. “I don’t know what’s happening, but none of this is real,” she said flatly. 

Tris awoke with a strained gasp, and fought against the bite of straps that held her into a chair. 

“I don’t know how the hell you figured it out, but you’re one of the strongest divergents that I’ve ever come across,” Jeanine spat to Tris’s left. 

“To be fair, you had me pretty fooled… that is, until my parents came in and everything got very weird,” Tris said. 

“Yes, of course. Your parents wouldn’t exactly be the kind anymore to rush in to save you,” Jeanine said quickly. 

“And that is exactly where you are wrong,” Tris said. “It wasn’t the fact that my parents came in to save, me, but-” Tris clamped her mouth shut at her eyes went wide.

“Yes, do you like that?” Jeanine asked as a cruel smirk unfurled across her face. “It’s a little something that I call truth serum. And it would appear as though not even you and your super strong divergence can battle it.” Jeanine put her hands on either arm rest, and leaned in close to Tris’s face. “Now then, tell me about your mother.”

“She’s an amazing, completely selfless woman who raised me and my brother very well,” Tris said. It wasn’t fighting against the truth serum because that was the truth. 

“Silence,” Jeanine spat out as she smacked Tris roughly. The hit stung, and Tris grit her teeth to stop from lashing out further. She was completely at Jeanine’s mercy now, and couldn’t even move thanks to the straps that held her down. “You and your kind are the dregs of this city, and I will not rest until every single one of you has been destroyed.”

“Really? We’re the least valuable ones of the city?” Tris said with a raised eyebrow. “Now, this might just be the truth serum talking, but we’re not the ones who’ve gone out of our way, completely annihilated one faction, and broken apart the flow of the city just to destroy a small handful of people that you, quite frankly, know next to nothing about.”

“You brat!” Jeanine snarled. She turned away from Tris for a second and then turned back around with a gun in her hands. She pointed it at Tris. “Things that we don’t understand must be destroyed.”

“For the leader of Erudite… the so-called ‘smart’ faction, you sure are really fucking stupid,” Tris said. She closed her eyes, in preparation for her death.

The door burst open and there was a loud crack of gunfire. Tris flinched, waiting for death to take her. She felt something warm and wet splatter onto her— her own blood? 

A second later, Tris felt somebody tugging on the straps, and she hesitantly opened her eyes.

“F-four?” she stammered out. Okay, he was literally the last person that she would have expected to come to her rescue. Tris closed her eyes again and tried to transport herself somewhere else. But when she opened her eyes again, she was still in the lab. This was real life. 

“Yes, I just saved you,” he said as he freed Tris’s arms. Tris was able to sit up then, and she stifled a horrified gasp at the site of Jeanine lying on the floor in a pool of blood. “Relax, she’s not dead… Yet. Mom wanted her alive to face punishment for what she’s done. Killing her here and now so quickly would be a mercy that she should not be allowed.”

Tris looked down at the blood that was splattered on her arm and realized that it must belong to Jeanine. Four finished undoing the straps that held Tris’s legs to the chair, and Tris moved to put Jeanine behind her. 

Four helped Tris to stand, and then pulled her into a warm embrace. Then, he kissed her, fully on the mouth. 

Tris pulled back and socked him in the jaw. He stumbled back a few steps, blinking with surprise. 

“Ow, what the hell?” Four complained as he rubbed his jaw. “I saved you, Beatrice! You should be grateful!”

“And I am!” Tris hissed at him as she brushed past him and into the hallway. “But just because you saved my life doesn’t now somehow mean that I owe you sex.”

Four followed her out into the hall and pulled out a small radio, that wasn’t completely unlike the walkie talkies that the divergent used. “I found Jeanine,” Four said into the radio. “She’s in lab 17. She’ll need some… uh… first aid, though.” 

“Roger that,” somebody replied quickly. “A team is on their way to extract her.” 

Tris, meanwhile, had turned away from Four and started to look into the other rooms that were down that hallway. “Where exactly do you thinking that you’re going? The exit is that way!” Four hissed to her as he caught up to her and tugged on her arm to get her to turn in the correct direction

“We have to find Eric and the other divergents that Jeanine captured,” Tris explained. She shoved Four off from her and kept walking in the direction that she was going. “I don’t care if you come with me, but I’m not going to stand for any of your super jealous, thinking that I should be yours bullshit.” She stopped and turned to face him. “Eric is my boyfriend. This isn’t because he’s done a bunch of nice stuff for me, but rather, because he treats me decently and as his equal. Apparently, a lesson that you could do to learn.”

She turned back around and continued to storm down the hall. Four hurried after her quietly. “I’m not going to kiss you again, but you shouldn’t be walking around unarmed… Here.” He handed her a gun, which she quickly checked before she continued on her way. 

The two of them came across a few Erudite members being hauled away by people who were wearing mismatched clothing that belonged to no faction. The unaligned people nodded slightly to Four and Tris as they hurried past, but they were not stopped. 

About fifteen minutes later, Four’s radio crackled and came to life, “Calling all divergents, this is Eric Coulter,” Eric said. 

“Eric!” Tris’s heart leapt into her throat at the sound of his voice. 

“Jeanine has been captured and Erudite has fallen. We have been saved. Meet everybody in the town center in one hour,” Eric went on. 

“They’re not going to believe it,” Tris said as she fought back tears. “If I hadn’t seen Jeanine lying in a pool of her own blood, I wouldn’t even believe it.” She reached for the radio on Four’s belt. 

“This is Tris Prior, and I can confirm that Jeanine has been subdued because I witnessed it happening,” she said into the radio. “We have been saved. This is not a trap!” She handed Four back his radio. 

“Let’s go,” Four said.

 

* * *

“Eric!” Tris cried out. She raced the few feet through the crowd that had gathered in the center of the town and into Eric’s arms. She brushed her hand over his face before he leaned over and kissed her soundly. 

“Tris, I was so worried about you,” he whispered against her lips. 

“Me, too,” Tris said.

“Is it true what you said?” Eric whispered as he lead her further away from the crowd. “Has she really been taken out?”

“Yes, Four shot her in the stomach, and then some people came and took her away,” Tris explained in a rush. “What’s happening?”

“Something not good,” Eric said as he turned to face the make-shift stage that had been set up near one of the buildings. Somebody stepped up to address the crowd. She looked familiar to Tris, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on how she knew the woman.

“Hello all, for those of you who don’t remember me, I’m Evelyn Johnson,” the woman started. There were some muted gasps and whispers after her introduction. Evelyn Johnson? As in Tobias Eaton’s mother… the one who had died nearly a decade ago? “Two days ago, our city was ripped apart by one woman’s greed and fear of the unknown! Today, the Factionless have brought it back together again! Jeanine Matthews is no more in charge of all of us! We will no longer be ruled by dividing up what makes us human, by factions! The Factionless rule this city now!”

Eric and Tris exchanged a worried look as the gathered crowd started to scream their approval of this. It was only then that Tris realized that Four had taken back the gun that he’d given her. And by the look on Eric’s face, he was also weaponless. Tris looked around at the gathered crowd; everybody who wasn’t Factionless had no weapon. 

“Have we just exchanged one dictator for another?” Eric asked. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And with the ending of one chapter begins another one. Please stay tuned, for I'll post the first chapter of the sequel up in a moment. (Because it sucks to have to wait for the author to put it up and maybe you aren't following them and you won't know if they've posted it up or not... ugh, what a pain.)

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you very much for reading! Please, let me know if you spotted any sort of grammatical errors so that I might fix them. Reviews and kudos are appreciated.


End file.
